Robert Koehler
Syndicated writer, editor at Tribune Media Services
Posted: July 29, 2010 10:41 AM

And so it turns out that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, though not until we arrived and started using them.

Along with whatever else we did to Fallujah — exacted collective punishment on a defiant city (a war crime) in November 2004, killed thousands of civilians, shattered the infrastructure (nearly six years later, the sewage system hasn’t been repaired and waste flows in the streets) — we also, apparently, nuked the city, leaving a legacy of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality and genetic abnormality.

Freedom isn’t free. Remember when that was the go-to phrase of the citizen war zealots among us, their all-purpose rebuttal when those of us appalled by this insane war cited civilian casualty stats? Discussion over. Thought stops here.

This is the power of language. Call it “war” and along come glory, duty, courage, sacrifice: the best of humanity writ large. The word is impenetrable; it sets the heart in motion; God makes an appearance, blesses the troops, blesses the weapons. Operation Iraqi Freedom: They’ll greet us with open arms.

At what point do we learn our lesson, that “war” is a moral cesspool of horrific consequences, especially, and most troublingly, unintended ones?

Thus last November, a group of British and Iraqi doctors petitioned the U.N. to investigate the alarming rise in birth defects at Fallujah’s hospitals. “Young women in Fallujah,” they wrote, “. . . are terrified of having children because of the increasing number of babies born grotesquely deformed, with no heads, two heads, a single eye in their foreheads, scaly bodies or missing limbs. In addition, young children in Fallujah are now experiencing hideous cancers and leukemias.”

The official U.S. response was that the doctors’ letter was anecdotal: There have been no studies to verify that anything is truly amiss in Fallujah, beyond the devastation caused by U.S. troops and bombs. Now that has changed.

The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health has just published an epidemiological study, “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005-2009,” which has found, among much else, that Fallujah is experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia and infant mortality than Hiroshima and Nagasaki did in 1945.

Perhaps most eerily, the study, conducted by a team of 11 researchers this past January and February, in 711 households, found a radical shift in the ratio of female-to-male births. Under normal circumstances, the human constant is approximately 1,050 boys born for every 1,000 girls. In post-invasion Fallujah, 860 boys have been born for every 1,000 girls — similar to a shift seen in Hiroshima after the atom bomb was dropped.

Dr. Chris Busby, one of the study’s authors, said only “some very major mutagenic exposure” could account for such an aberration. The most likely culprit, he said, is depleted uranium, a dense metal with extraordinary penetrating ability used in the manufacture of missiles, shells and bombs. DU explodes on impact into an extremely fine, radioactive dust that settles on the ground or is carried by the wind. While the U.S. military continues to deny that breathing it is harmful, many scientists insist that it is highly toxic and a likely contributor to Gulf War Syndrome — that it is, in short, a nuclear weapon, with fallout as dangerous as a nuclear bomb.

To read about this is to grow increasingly sickened and disturbed at who we are and what we are doing: still debating “the war,” still dignifying this ongoing hemorrhage of national values with the term; still murdering civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and resolutely fleeing from any responsibility for the ecocide we have committed in Iraq; and still silently, inevitably, preparing for the next one.

Would that we could bring the suffering of Fallujah to the heart of America, or at least to the heart of Congress, which just OK’d another $59 billion to “fund the troops” (notice the delicacy of the Pentagon’s phrasing) in Afghanistan.

Enormous, future-devouring numbers turn over in Congress with such ease, if the money is demanded by the war machine. Money dedicated to building the future, or repairing the damage from old, dead wars, is another matter entirely: Suddenly it’s real, like a pound of flesh, and meted out only with howls of anguish.

To help clean up our legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam, for instance, Congress has appropriated $9 million since 2007. We sprayed 19 million gallons of this highly toxic defoliant on the country between 1962 and 1971, causing harm to at least 3 million Vietnamese in the process. Our sense of responsibility amounts to $3 per person. And such money becomes available only after decades of denial that we have any responsibility at all.

I think again about Fallujah. The city’s suffering will haunt our national dreams for decades to come. It is our future. In a generation or so, our children will face the consequences of what we have done there; but in the meantime, we’ll keep trying to buy “victory” and ultimate justification in multi-billion-dollar increments until our financial bankruptcy equals our moral bankruptcy.

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Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, contributor to One World, Many Peaces and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available for pre-orders. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

© 2010 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

by Chris Hedges

The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn our economic crisis into a political crisis. The street protests, strikes and riots that have rattled France, Turkey, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Iceland will descend on us. It is only a matter of time. And not much time. When things start to go sour, when Barack Obama is exposed as a mortal waving a sword at a tidal wave, the United States could plunge into a long period of precarious social instability.

At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.

How will we cope with our decline? Will we cling to the absurd dreams of a superpower and a glorious tomorrow or will we responsibly face our stark new limitations? Will we heed those who are sober and rational, those who speak of a new simplicity and humility, or will we follow the demagogues and charlatans who rise up out of the slime in moments of crisis to offer fantastic visions? Will we radically transform our system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate state, or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent? We won’t have to wait long to find out.

There are a few isolated individuals who saw it coming. The political philosophers Sheldon S. Wolin, John Ralston Saul and Andrew Bacevich, as well as writers such as Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, David Korten and Naomi Klein, along with activists such as Bill McKibben and Ralph Nader, rang the alarm bells. They were largely ignored or ridiculed. Our corporate media and corporate universities proved, when we needed them most, intellectually and morally useless.

Wolin, who taught political philosophy at the University of California in Berkeley and at Princeton, in his book “Democracy Incorporated” uses the phrase inverted totalitarianism to describe our system of power. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism and the Constitution while cynically manipulating internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens, but they must raise staggering amounts of corporate funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington or state capitals who write the legislation. A corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion or diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. “Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics-and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.”

I reached Wolin, 86, by phone at his home about 25 miles north of San Francisco. He was a bombardier in the South Pacific during World War II and went to Harvard after the war to get his doctorate. Wolin has written classics such as “Politics and Vision” and “Tocqueville Between Two Worlds.” His newest book is one of the most important and prescient critiques to date of the American political system. He is also the author of a series of remarkable essays on Augustine of Hippo, Richard Hooker, David Hume, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and John Dewey. His voice, however, has faded from public awareness because, as he told me, “it is harder and harder for people like me to get a public hearing.” He said that publications, such as The New York Review of Books, which often published his work a couple of decades ago, lost interest in his critiques of American capitalism, his warnings about the subversion of democratic institutions and the emergence of the corporate state. He does not hold out much hope for Obama.

“The basic systems are going to stay in place; they are too powerful to be challenged,” Wolin told me when I asked him about the new Obama administration. “This is shown by the financial bailout. It does not bother with the structure at all. I don’t think Obama can take on the kind of military establishment we have developed. This is not to say that I do not admire him. He is probably the most intelligent president we have had in decades. I think he is well meaning, but he inherits a system of constraints that make it very difficult to take on these major power configurations. I do not think he has the appetite for it in any ideological sense. The corporate structure is not going to be challenged. There has not been a word from him that would suggest an attempt to rethink the American imperium.”

Wolin argues that a failure to dismantle our vast and overextended imperial projects, coupled with the economic collapse, is likely to result in inverted totalitarianism. He said that without “radical and drastic remedies” the response to mounting discontent and social unrest will probably lead to greater state control and repression. There will be, he warned, a huge “expansion of government power.” “Our political culture has remained unhelpful in fostering a democratic consciousness,” he said. “The political system and its operatives will not be constrained by popular discontent or uprisings.”

Wolin writes that in inverted totalitarianism consumer goods and a comfortable standard of living, along with a vast entertainment industry that provides spectacles and diversions, keep the citizenry politically passive. I asked if the economic collapse and the steady decline in our standard of living might not, in fact, trigger classical totalitarianism. Could widespread frustration and poverty lead the working and middle classes to place their faith in demagogues, especially those from the Christian right? “I think that’s perfectly possible,” he answered. “That was the experience of the 1930s. There wasn’t just FDR. There was Huey Long and Father Coughlin. There were even more extreme movements including the Klan. The extent to which those forces can be fed by the downturn and bleakness is a very real danger. It could become classical totalitarianism.”

He said the widespread political passivity is dangerous. It is often exploited by demagogues who pose as saviors and offer dreams of glory and salvation. He warned that “the apoliticalness, even anti-politicalness, will be very powerful elements in taking us towards a radically dictatorial direction. It testifies to how thin the commitment to democracy is in the present circumstances. Democracy is not ascendant. It is not dominant. It is beleaguered. The extent to which young people have been drawn away from public concerns and given this extraordinary range of diversions makes it very likely they could then rally to a demagogue.”

Wolin lamented that the corporate state has successfully blocked any real debate about alternative forms of power. Corporations determine who gets heard and who does not, he said. And those who critique corporate power are given no place in the national dialogue. “In the 1930s there were all kinds of alternative understandings, from socialism to more extensive governmental involvement,” he said. “There was a range of different approaches. But what I am struck by now is the narrow range within which palliatives are being modeled. We are supposed to work with the financial system. So the people who helped create this system are put in charge of the solution. There has to be some major effort to think outside the box.”

“The puzzle to me is the lack of social unrest,” Wolin said when I asked why we have not yet seen rioting or protests. He said he worried that popular protests will be dismissed and ignored by the corporate media. This, he said, is what happened when tens of thousands protested the war in Iraq. This will permit the state to ruthlessly suppress local protests, as happened during the Democratic and Republic conventions. Anti-war protests in the 1960s gained momentum from their ability to spread across the country, he noted. This, he said, may not happen this time. “The ways they can isolate protests and prevent it from [becoming] a contagion are formidable,” he said.

“My greatest fear is that the Obama administration will achieve relatively little in terms of structural change,” he added. “They may at best keep the system going. But there is a growing pessimism. Every day we hear how much longer the recession will continue. They are already talking about beyond next year. The economic difficulties are more profound than we had guessed and because of globalization more difficult to deal with. I wish the political establishment, the parties and leadership, would become more aware of the depths of the problem. They can’t keep throwing money at this. They have to begin structural changes that involve a very different approach from a market economy. I don’t think this will happen.”

“I keep asking why and how and when this country became so conservative,” he went on. “This country once prided itself on its experimentation and flexibility. It has become rigid. It is probably the most conservative of all the advanced countries.” The American left, he said, has crumbled. It sold out to a bankrupt Democratic Party, abandoned the working class and has no ability to organize. Unions are a spent force. The universities are mills for corporate employees. The press churns out info-entertainment or fatuous pundits. The left, he said, no longer has the capacity to be a counterweight to the corporate state. He said that if an extreme right gains momentum there will probably be very little organized resistance.

“The left is amorphous,” he said. “I despair over the left. Left parties may be small in number in Europe but they are a coherent organization that keeps going. Here, except for Nader’s efforts, we don’t have that. We have a few voices here, a magazine there, and that’s about it. It goes nowhere.”

© 2009 TruthDig.com

Are Americans ‘Better Than That’?

By Ray McGovern
December 12, 2007

A boyish, inquisitive face with an innocent look peered out from the Washington Post’s lead story on torture. It was well groomed, pink-shirted John Kiriakou, a CIA interrogator who could just as easily pass for the local youth minister.

The Dec. 11 report by the Post’s Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen, which describes Kiriakou’s experience in interrogating suspected terrorists, raises in an unusually direct way an abiding question: Should the United States of America be using forms of torture dating back to the Spanish Inquisition?

Nowhere is the mood of that infamous period better portrayed than in the famous Grand Inquisitor chapter of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky was unusually gifted at plumbing the human heart.

While it has been 127 years since he wrote Brothers Karamazov, he nonetheless captures the trap into which so many Americans have fallen in forfeiting freedom through fear.

His portrayal of Inquisition reality brings us to the brink of the moral precipice on which our country teeters today. It is as though he knew what would be in store for us as fear was artificially stoked after the attacks of 9/11.

In the story, Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (the Cardinal of Seville) ridicules Christ for imposing on humans the heavy burden of freedom of conscience, and explains how it is far better, for all concerned, to dull that conscience and to rule by deceit, violence, and fear:

“Didst thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?…We teach them that it’s not the free judgment of their hearts, but mystery which they must follow blindly, even against their conscience…. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet [and] become obedient…We shall tell them that we are Thy servants and rule them in Thy name…. we shall be forced to lie…. We shall tell them that every sin will be expiated if it is done with our permission.”
–The Grand Inquisitor, in Brothers Karamazov

Abu Zubayda: Poster Child

Kiriakou was one of the first interrogators to interview suspected terrorist Abu Zubayda in a Pakistani military hospital, where Zubayda was recovering from wounds suffered during his capture in early 2002.

When he refused to provide information about al-Qaeda’s infrastructure, he was flown to a secret CIA prison where, according to Kiriakou, the interrogation team strapped Abu Zubayda to a board, wrapped his nose and mouth in cellophane, and forced water into his throat.

In just 35 seconds, viola! Abu Zubayda starting talking. That is called waterboarding.

The 15th & 16th century Spanish inquisitors were not squeamish, and had little need for circumlocutions or euphemisms like “alternative set of procedures” that are part of President George W. Bush’s lexicon.

The Spanish called this procedure, quite plainly, “tortura del agua.”

Lacking cellophane, they inserted a cloth into the victim’s mouth, forcing the victim to ingest water spilled from a jar starting the drowning process. Four centuries later, the Gestapo put out several technically improved releases of this operating system of torture, so to speak.

Quick; someone please tell newly confirmed Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who told reporters on Dec. 11 that he still cannot decide whether waterboarding is torture.

The information from John Kiriakou confirms what has long been a no-brainer but not definitively established before; namely, that President George W. Bush’s “alternative set of procedures” for interrogation by C.I.A. includes waterboarding.

Zubayda was given pride of place in George W. Bush’s remarkable speech of Sept. 6, 2006, in which he bragged about the effectiveness of such procedures and appealed successfully for passage of the Military Commissions Act.

That law allows a president to define what set of interrogation procedures can be used by the C.I.A. This is Bush on Sept. 6, 2006:

“We believe that Zubayda was a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden…[and that] he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained…

“We knew that Zubayda had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking…And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures…The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful…. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.

“Zubayda was questioned using these procedures, and soon he began to provide information on key al-Qaeda operatives, including information that helped us find and capture more of those responsible for the attacks on September the 11th.

“For example, Zubayda identified one of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s accomplices in the 9/11 attacks — a terrorist named Ramzi bin al Shibh. The information Zubayda provided helped lead to the capture of bin al Shibh. And together these two terrorists provided information that helped in the planning and execution of the operation that captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”

Saving Lives?

Bush claimed that his interrogation program had saved lives, and Kiriakou says the use of waterboarding “probably saved lives.” We cannot know for sure if this is true.

Off-the-record interviews with intelligence officials strongly suggest that there is much prevarication and exaggeration in the president’s claims about lives saved and operations disrupted, and that his assertions merit no more credulity than other claims—for example, that Iran’s nuclear weapons program poses a threat to the U.S., even though it has been stopped for four years.

Other U.S. intelligence officials take issue with the C.I.A.’s version of the questioning of Zubayda. Some say that initially he was cooperating with F.B.I. interrogators using a non-confrontational approach, when C.I.A. assumed control and opted for more aggressive tactics.

After that experience, the F.B.I. reportedly warned its agents to avoid interrogation sessions at which harsh methods were used.

As for credibility, never has a U.S. president’s word been so cheapened as it is today.

In late July 2007, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity joined with Justin Frank, MD, psychiatrist, professor at George Washington University Hospital, and author of “Bush on the Couch,” to search for insight on how President Bush thinks. See “Dangers of a Cornered Bush,” from which we excerpt the following:

“His pathology is a patchwork of false beliefs and incomplete information woven into what he asserts is the whole truth…He lies—not just to us, but to himself as well…What makes lying so easy for Bush is his contempt—for language, for law, and for anybody who dares question him…. So his words mean nothing. That is very important for people to understand.”

This Is Oversight?

The past few weeks have witnessed an unseemly square dance in Congress, highlighting conflicting claims about what those who are supposed to be overseeing the intelligence community knew and when they knew it—about torture, about Iran, about many things.

It is nothing short of an insult to the Founders that members of the House and Senate can find nothing more useful to do than wring their hands over their largely self-inflicted powerlessness.

Lawmakers have been so thoroughly intimidated by the White House that I get physically ill watching the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Jane Harman, Bob Graham and Jay Rockefeller moan about how secretive and nasty the Bush administration has been.

Harman complained recently that when she was ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, some of the material (on interrogations) was so highly classified that she had to take a “second oath” to protect it.

What about the solemn oath they all take to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic? Should not that oath transcend and govern others that an administration might require for access to secret materials?

Senator Dick Durbin of the Senate Intelligence Committee has complained that he was aware that classified information did not justify the conclusion in 2002 that Iraq had unconventional weapons, but he could not say anything because it was classified! Durbin explained:

“We’re duty-bound once we enter that room to respect classified information. Everything you hear is supposed to stay in the room…I certainly had enough to know that the statements that were made about mushroom clouds were not the conclusions of someone in the administration who was really being honest about the full debate. But you really know, walking in the room, what the rules of the game will be.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has admitted knowing for several years about the Bush administration’s eavesdropping on Americans without a court warrant. She was briefed on it when she was ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee when Bush and Cheney took office.

One key unanswered question is this: Was she told that within days of their taking office—that is, seven months before 9/11, the National Security Agency’s electronic vacuum cleaner had already begun to suck up information on Americans—the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, not to mention the Constitution, be damned?

In a Washington Post op-ed of Jan. 15, 2006, Pelosi proudly advertised her uniquely long tenure on the Intelligence Committee and acknowledged that she was one of the privileged handful of lawmakers who were briefed.

“This is how I came to be informed of President Bush’s authorization for the NSA to conduct certain types of surveillance,” she wrote. Pelosi then proceeded to demonstrate the bowing and scraping characteristic of her subservient attitude toward the Executive Branch:

“But when the administration notifies Congress in this manner, it is not seeking approval. There is a clear expectation that the information will be shared by no one, including other members of the intelligence committees. As a result, only a few members of Congress were aware of the president’s surveillance program, and they were constrained from discussing it more widely.”

And so too, may we assume, with respect to torture? This is oversight?

Neutered Watchdogs

What can we expect from the current Senate and House oversight chairmen regarding the recently disclosed, deliberate destruction of two tapes of harsh interrogations of Abu Zubayda and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri? (Al-Nashiri is thought to have played a role in the attack on the USS Cole.)

On the Senate side, expect nothing of Mr. Milquetoast Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who, it is said, is so afraid of his own shadow that he only ventures outdoors at night or in bad weather.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes has a different kind of problem, and should recuse himself. He has been fawning all over José Rodriguez, the former CIA Deputy Director of Operations who ordered the tapes destroyed.

On August 16, 2007, Congressman Reyes told a conference in El Paso he considered Rodriguez “an American hero,” proudly adding that, “with a few liberties that Hollywood takes, the exploits of José Rodriguez are documented in the FOX TV series ‘24.’”

I am told that almost every episode of “24” includes at least one scene glorifying torture, usually with lead man Jack Bauer playing a main role. Reyes made it clear he is a big fan of Bauer and “24.”

Were that not enough, after Rodriguez’s role in destroying the interrogation tapes became public, Reyes immediately cautioned against allowing investigations to find just one “scapegoat” (no secret to whom he was referring).

And so, unless Reyes does recuse himself, look for a “complete and thorough” investigation of the kind favored by the Nixon White House. (Just when you may have thought it could not get any worse!)

On Sept. 6, 2006, the very day Bush bragged about his “alternative set of procedures for interrogation” and appealed for legislation allowing the C.I.A. to continue using them, the head of Army intelligence, Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, took a very different tack.

Conducting a Pentagon briefing shortly before the president gave his own speech, Kimmons underscored the fact that the revised Army manual for interrogation is in sync with the Geneva treaties. Then, conceding past “transgressions and mistakes,” Kimmons updated something I learned 45 years ago as a second lieutenant in Army intelligence:

“No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.”

Grabbing the headlines the following day was Bush’s admission that the CIA has taken “high-value” captives to prisons abroad for interrogation using “tough” techniques prohibited by the revised Army field manual—and by Geneva, for that matter.

Gen. Kimmons displayed uncommon courage in facing into that wind.

Because It’s Wrong?

Have you noticed the shameful silence of our institutional churches, synagogues, and mosques?

True, on occasion a professor of moral theology will speak out.

Professor William Schweiker of the Chicago Divinity School, for example, has heaped scorn on the scenario of the lone knower of the facts whose torture is thought to be able to save millions of lives. He notes that such is “the stuff of bad spy movies and bad exam questions in ethics courses.” Schweiker warns Christians, in particular:

“Not to fall prey to fear and questionable reasoning and thus continue to support an unjust and vile practice that demeans the nation’s highest political and moral ideals, even as it desecrates one of the most important practices and symbols (Baptism) of the Christian faith.”

And, to its credit, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, a coalition of 130 religious organizations from left to right on the political spectrum, issued a strong call for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the C.I.A.’s destruction of the videotapes of harsh interrogation techniques.

NRCAT’s founder, Princeton Theological Seminary professor George Hunsinger told the press that “to acknowledge that waterboarding is torture is like conceding that the sun rises in the east,” adding:

“All the dissembling in high places that makes these shocking abuses possible must be brought to an end. But they will undoubtedly continue unless those responsible for them are held accountable. Clearly a joint probe by the Justice Department and the CIA — agencies that are both seriously compromised — is not enough. A special counsel is an essential first step.”

But where are the official voices of the institutional churches, synagogues, and mosques in this country. In effect, they are ordaining Jack Bauer with their silence.

This Happened Before

With very few exceptions, the institutional churches in Nazi Germany kept a shameful silence, denying believers the moral authority and leadership so needed to stand up to Gestapo torturers. Indeed, many of the bishops—like military leaders, and jurists—swore a personal oath to Hitler.

For his part, the Nazi leader moved quite quickly to ensure that there was a pastor—whether Evangelical or Catholic—in every parish in Germany. He saw this as a source of support and stability for his regime. And, sadly, it was.

While the Nazis were systematically torturing and even murdering defenseless victims, they kept repeating assurances that not a single hair of anyone’s head would be harmed. (Shades of the familiar refrain “we do not torture.”)

And the propaganda machine under Joseph Goebbels made a fine art of what President Bush calls the need to “catapult the propaganda.”

Sebastian Haffner, a young German lawyer in Berlin during the Thirties, kept a journal that his children subsequently published in book form as “Defying Hitler.” His fascinating account of Germany in the Thirties provides many thoughtful insights into prevailing attitudes and the lack of moral leadership.

Haffner’s journal depicted the kind of ambiance in which the approach of the Grand Inquisitor would, and did, flourish—“in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet [and] become obedient:”

Haffner wrote: “The weather in March 1933 was glorious. Was it not wonderful to…merge with festive crowds and listen to speeches about freedom and homeland? (It was certainly better than having one’s belly pumped up with a water hose in some hidden secret police cellar.)”

Haffner closes his chapter on 1933 with observations that, in my view, apply much too aptly to America today:

“The sequence of events is, as you see, not so unnatural. It is wholly within the normal range of psychology, and it helps to explain the almost inexplicable. The only thing that is missing is what in animals is called ‘breeding.’

“This is a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle, and dignity to be drawn on in the hour of trial. It is missing in Germans.

“As a nation we are soft, unreliable, and without backbone. That was shown in March 1933. At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown.”

C.I.A.’s John Kiriakou says he is now convinced that waterboarding is torture and he is against it. He adds, “Americans are better than that.”

Are We Better Than That?

Sadly, that remains to be seen. With virtually all religious institutions, politicians, and educators squandering what moral authority they have left, the Jack Bauer culture threatens to win out in the end. We cannot let that happen.

The upcoming duel on the missing interrogation tapes will again bring the issue of torture front and center. And, strangely, waterboarding and other Jack Bauer tradecraft tools still enjoy a strong constituency.

Here’s where we come in; for we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. As one of my intelligence alumni colleagues noted recently, this is about our country losing its soul.

Let’s rise to the occasion and stop unconscionable policies like torture. True patriotism goes well beyond a flag-on-the-lapel.

As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted, “Sometimes you have to put your body into it.”

Besides, we need to keep the water hose from pumping up our bellies and those of our loved ones. I only wish that were as remote a possibility as it was before President Bush and his associates came up with their “alternative set of procedures.”

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was an Army officer and then a C.I.A. analyst for 27 years, and now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

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Attacking Iran for Israel?

By Ray McGovern
October 30, 2007

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is at her mushroom-cloud hyperbolic best, and this time Iran is the target.

Her claim last week that “the policies of Iran constitute perhaps the single greatest challenge to American security interests in the Middle East and around the world” is simply too much of a stretch. To gauge someone’s reliability, one depends largely on prior experience. Sadly, Rice’s credibility suffers in comparison with that of the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohammed ElBaradei, who insists there is no evidence of an active nuclear weapons program in Iran. If this sounds familiar, ElBaradei said the same thing about Iraq before it was attacked. But three days before the invasion, American nuclear expert Dick Cheney told NBC’s Tim Russert, “I think Mr. ElBaradei is, frankly, wrong.”

Here we go again. As in the case of Iraq, U.S. intelligence has been assiduously looking for evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran; but, alas, in vain. Burned by the bogus “proof” adduced for Iraq—the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes—the administration has shied away from fabricating nuclear-related “evidence.” Are Bush and Cheney again relying on the Rumsfeld dictum, that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?” There is a simpler answer.

Cat Out of the Bag

The Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Sallai Meridor, let the cat out of the bag while speaking at the American Jewish Committee luncheon on Oct. 22. In remarks paralleling those of Rice, Meridor said Iran is the chief threat to Israel. Heavy on the chutzpah, he served gratuitous notice on Washington that effectively countering Iran’s nuclear ambitions will take a “united United States in this matter,” lest the Iranians conclude, “come January ’09, they have it their own way.” Meridor stressed that “very little time” remained to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. How so? Even were there to be a nuclear program hidden from the IAEA, no serious observer expects Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon much sooner than five years from now. Truth be told, every other year since 1995 U.S. intelligence has been predicting that Iran could have a nuclear weapon in about five years. It has become downright embarrassing — like a broken record, punctuated only by so-called “neo-conservatives” like James Woolsey, who last summer publicly warned that the U.S. may have no choice but to bomb Iran in order to halt its nuclear weapons program. Woolsey, self-described “anchor of the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs,” put it this way:

“I’m afraid that within, well, at worst, a few months; at best, a few years; they [the Iranians] could have the bomb.” The day before Meridor’s unintentionally revealing remark, Vice President Dick Cheney reiterated, “We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

That remark followed closely on President George W. Bush’s apocalyptic warning of World War III, should Tehran acquire the knowledge to produce a nuclear weapon.

The Israelis appear convinced they have extracted a promise from Bush and Cheney that they will help Israel nip Iran’s nuclear program in the bud before they leave office. Never mind that there is no evidence that the Iranian nuclear program is any more weapons-related than the one Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld persuaded President Gerald Ford to approve in 1976 for Westinghouse and General Electric to install for the Shah (price tag $6.4 billion). With 200-300 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, the Israelis enjoy a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. They mean to keep that monopoly and are pressing for the U.S. to obliterate Iran’s fledgling nuclear program.

Anyone aware of Iran’s ability to retaliate realizes this would bring disaster to the whole region and beyond. But this has not stopped Cheney and Bush before. The rationale is similar to that revealed by Philip Zelikow, confidant of Condoleezza Rice, former member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and later executive director of the 9/11 Commission. On Oct. 10, 2002, Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia:

“Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat is—it’s the threat to Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name…the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.”

Harbinger?

The political offensive against Iran coalesced as George W. Bush began his second term, with Cheney out in front pressing for an attack on its nuclear-related facilities. During a Jan. 20, 2005, interview with MSNBC, just hours before Bush’s second inauguration, Cheney put Iran “right at the top of the list of trouble spots,” and noted that negotiations and UN sanctions might fail to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Cheney then added with remarkable nonchalance:
“Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards.”
Does this not sound like the so-called “Cheney plan” being widely discussed in the media today? An Israeli air attack; Iranian retaliation; Washington springing to the defense of its “ally” Israel? A big fan of preemption, Cheney has done little to disguise his attraction to Israel’s penchant to preempt, such as Israel’s air strike against the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981. Ten years after the Osirak attack, then-Defense Secretary Cheney reportedly gave Israeli Maj. Gen. David Ivri, commander of the Israeli Air Force, a satellite photo of the Iraqi nuclear reactor destroyed by U.S.-built Israeli aircraft. On the photo Cheney penned, “Thanks for the outstanding job on the Iraqi nuclear program in 1981.” Nothing is known of Ivri’s response, but it is a safe bet it was along the lines of “we could not have done it without U.S. help.”

Indeed, though the U.S. officially condemned the attack (the Reagan administration was supporting Saddam Hussein’s Iraq at that point), the intelligence shared by the Pentagon with the Israelis made a major contribution to the success of the Israeli raid. With Vice President Cheney calling the shots now, similar help may be forthcoming prior to any Israeli air attack on Iran. It is no secret that former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon began to press for an early preemptive strike on Iran in 2003, claiming that Iran was likely to obtain a nuclear weapon much earlier than what U.S. intelligence estimated. Sharon made a habit of bringing his own military adviser to brief Bush with aerial photos of Iranian nuclear-related installations.

More troubling still, in the fall of 2004, retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush and as Chair of the younger Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, made some startling comments to the Financial Times. A master of discretion with the media, Scowcroft nonetheless saw fit to make public his conclusion that Sharon had Bush “mesmerized;” that he had our president “wrapped around his little finger.”

Needless to say, Scowcroft was immediately removed from the advisory board.

An Unstable Infatuation

George W. Bush first met Sharon in 1998, when the Texas governor was taken on a tour of the Middle East by Matthew Brooks, then executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. Sharon was foreign minister and took Bush on a helicopter tour over the Israeli occupied territories.

An Aug. 3, 2006, McClatchy wire story by Ron Hutcheson quotes Matthew Brooks:

“If there’s a starting point for George W. Bush’s attachment to Israel, it’s the day in late 1998, when he stood on a hilltop where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and, with eyes brimming with tears, read aloud from his favorite hymn, ‘Amazing Grace.’ He was very emotional. It was a tear-filled experience. He brought Israel back home with him in his heart. I think he came away profoundly moved.”

Bush made gratuitous but revealing reference to that trip at the first meeting of his National Security Council on Jan. 30, 2001. After announcing he would abandon the decades-long role of “honest broker” between Israelis and Palestinians and would tilt pronouncedly toward Israel, Bush said he would let Sharon resolve the dispute however he saw fit. At that point he brought up his trip to Israel with the Republican Jewish Coalition and the flight over Palestinian camps, but there was no sense of concern for the lot of the Palestinians. In Ron Suskind’s Price of Loyalty, then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who was at the NSC meeting, quotes Bush: “Looked real bad down there,” the president said with a frown. Then Bush said it was time to end America’s efforts in the region. “I don’t see much we can do over there at this point,” he said. O’Neill also reported that Colin Powell, the newly minted but nominal secretary of state, was taken completely by surprise at this nonchalant jettisoning of longstanding policy. Powell demurred, warning that this would unleash Sharon and “the consequences could be dire, especially for the Palestinians.” But according to O’Neill, Bush just shrugged, saying, “Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things.” O’Neill says that Powell seemed “startled.”

It is a safe bet that the vice president was in no way startled.

What Now?

The only thing that seems to be standing in the way of a preemptive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is foot-dragging by the U.S. military. It seems likely that the senior military have told the president and Cheney: This time let us brief you on what to expect on Day 2, on Week 4, on Month 6—and on the many serious things Iran can do to Israel, and to us in Iraq and elsewhere. CENTCOM commander Admiral William Fallon is reliably reported to have said, “We are not going to do Iran on my watch.” And in an online Q-and-A, award-winning Washington Post reporter Dana Priest recently spoke of a possible “revolt” if pilots were ordered to fly missions against Iran. She added:

“This is a little bit of hyperbole, but not much. Just look at what Gen. [George] Casey, the Army chief, has said…that the tempo of operations in Iraq would make it very hard for the military to respond to a major crisis elsewhere. Beside, it’s not the ‘war’ or ‘bombing’ part that’s difficult; it’s the morning after and all the days after that. Haven’t we learned that (again) from Iraq?”

How about Congress? Could it act as a brake on Bush and Cheney? Forget it. If the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) with its overflowing coffers supports an attack on Iran, so will most of our spineless lawmakers. Already, AIPAC has succeeded in preventing legislation that would have required the president to obtain advance authorization for an attack on Iran. And for every Admiral Fallon, there is someone like the inimitable, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, a close associate of James Woolsey and other “neo-cons.” The air campaign “will be easy,” says McInerney, a Fox News pundit who was a rabid advocate of shock and awe over Iraq. “Ahmadinejad has nothing in Iran that we can’t penetrate,” he adds, and several hundred bombers, including stealth bombers, will be enough to do the trick:
“Forty-eight hours duration, hitting 2,500 aim points to take out their nuclear facilities, their air defense facilities, their air force, their navy, their Shahab-3 retaliatory missiles, and finally their command and control. And then let the Iranian people take their country back.”

And the rationale? Since it will be a hard sell to promote the idea, against all evidence, of an imminent threat that Iran is about to have a nuclear weapon, the White House PR machine is likely to focus on other evidence showing that Iran is supporting those “killing our troops in Iraq.”

The scary thing is that Cheney is more likely to use the McInerneys and Woolseys than the Fallons and Caseys in showing the president how easily it can be done.

Madness

It is not as though we have not had statesmen wise enough to warn us against foreign entanglements, and about those who have difficulty distinguishing between the strategic interests of the United States and those of other nations, even allies:

“A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation facilitates the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, infuses into one the enmities of the other, and betrays the former into participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.”
(George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796)

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

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Created 08/22/2007 - 9:37am

by Ray McGovern
It is as though I’m back as an analyst at the CIA, trying to estimate the chances of an attack on Iran. The putative attacker, though, happens to be our own president.

It is precisely the kind of work we analysts used to do. And, while it is still a bit jarring to be turning our analytical tools on the U.S. leadership, it is by no means entirely new. For, of necessity, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been doing that for almost six years now — ever since 9/11, when “everything changed.”

Of necessity? Yes, because, with very few exceptions, American journalists put their jobs at grave risk if they expose things such as fraudulent wars.

The craft of CIA analysis was designed to be an all-source operation, meaning that we analysts were responsible — and held accountable — for assimilating information from all sources and coming to judgments on what it all meant. We used data of various kinds, from the most sophisticated technical collection platforms, to spies, to not the least — open media.

Here I must reveal a trade secret and risk puncturing the mystique of intelligence analysis. Generally speaking, 80 percent of the information one needs to form judgments on key intelligence targets or issues is available in open media. It helps to have been trained — as my contemporaries and I had the good fortune to be trained — by past masters of the discipline of media analysis, which began in a structured way in targeting Japanese and German media in the 1940s. But, truth be told, anyone with a high school education can do it. It is not rocket science.

Reporting From Informants

The above is in no way intended to minimize the value of intelligence collection by CIA case officers recruiting and running clandestine agents. For, though small in percentage of the whole nine yards available to be analyzed, information from such sources can often make a crucial contribution. Consider, for example, the daring recruitment in mid-2002 of Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri, who was successfully “turned” into working for the CIA and quickly established his credibility. Sabri told us there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

My former colleagues, perhaps a bit naively, were quite sure this would come as a welcome relief to President George W. Bush and his advisers. Instead, they were told that the White House had no further interest in reporting from Sabri; rather, that the issue was not really WMD, it was “regime change.” (Don’t feel embarrassed if you did not know this; although it is publicly available, our corporate-owned, war profiteering media has largely suppressed this key story.)

One former colleague, operations officer-par-excellence Robert Baer, now reports (in this week’s Time) that, according to his sources, the Bush/Cheney administration is winding up for a strike on Iran; that the Administration’s plan to put Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terrorism list points in the direction of such a strike; and that the delusional “neo-conservative” thinking that still guides White House policy concludes that such an attack would lead to the fall of the clerics and the rise of a more friendly Iran.

Hold on, it gets even worse: Baer’s sources tell him that administration officials are thinking “as long as we have bombers and missiles in the air, we will hit Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Rove and Snow: Going Wobbly?

Our VIPS colleague Phil Geraldi, writing in The American Conservative, earlier noted that in the past, Karl Rove served as a counterweight to Vice President Dick Cheney, and may have tried to put the brakes on Cheney’s death wish to expand the Middle East quagmire to Iran. And former Pentagon officer, retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the most devoted neo-cons just before the attack on Iraq, has put into words (on LewRockwell.com) the speculation several of us have been indulging in with respect to Rove’s departure.

In short, it seems possible that Rove, who is no one’s dummy and would not want to be required to “spin” an unnecessary war on Iran, may have lost the battle with Cheney over the merits of a military strike on Iran, and only then decided — or was urged — to spend more time with his family. As for Administration spokesperson Tony Snow, it seems equally possible that, before deciding he had to leave the White House to make more money, he concluded that his stomach could not withstand the challenge of conjuring up yet another Snow job to explain why Bush/Cheney needed to attack Iran. There is recent precedent for this kind of thing.

We now know that it was because former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld went wobbly on the Iraq war — as can be seen in his Nov. 6, 2006 memo to the president — that Rumsfeld was canned. (That was the day BEFORE the election.) In that memo, Rumsfeld called for a “major adjustment” in war policy. And so, Robert Gates, who had been waiting in the wings, was called to Crawford, given the test for malleability, hired, and dispatched by the president immediately to Iraq to weigh in heavily with the most senior U.S. generals (Abizaid and Casey). They had been saying, quite openly, Please, please; no more troops; a surge would simply give the Iraqis still more time and opportunity to diddle us while American troops continue to die. So much for the president always listening to his senior military commanders. And the bug of reality was infecting even Rumsfeld.

In his memo to the president, Rumsfeld suggested that U.S. generals “withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable positions-cities, patrolling, etc.,” and move troops to Kuwait to serve as a Quick Reaction Force. Bush, of course, chose to do just the opposite.

Our domesticated press has not yet been able to put two and two together on this story, so it has been left to investigative reporters such as Robert Parry to do so. In his Aug. 17 essay [1], “Rumsfeld’s Mysterious Resignation,” Parry closes with this:

“The touchy secret about Rumsfeld’s departure seems to have been that Bush didn’t want the American people to know that one of the chief Iraq War architects had turned against the idea of an open-ended military commitment — and that Bush had found himself with no choice but to oust Rumsfeld for his loss of faith in the neoconservative cause.”

Granted, it is speculative that similar factors, this time with respect to war planning for Iran, were at work in the decisions on the departure of Rove and Snow. Someone ought to ask them.

Surgical Strikes First?

With the propaganda buildup we have seen so far on Iran, what seems most likely, at least initially, is an attack on Revolutionary Guard training facilities inside Iran. That can be done with cruise missiles. With some 20 targets already identified by anti-Iranian groups, there are enough assets already in place to do that job. But the “while-we’re-at-it” neo-con logic referred to above may well be applied after, or even in conjunction with, that kind of limited cruise missile attack.

Cheerleading in the Domesticated Media

Yes, it is happening again.

The lead editorial in yesterday’s Washington Post regurgitates the allegations that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is “supplying the weapons that are killing a growing number of American soldiers in Iraq”; that it is “waging war against the United States and trying to kill as many American soldiers as possible.” Designating Iran a “specially designated global terrorist” organization, says the Post, “seems to be the least the United States should be doing, giving the soaring number of Iranian-sponsored bomb attacks in Iraq.”

It’s as though Dick Cheney and friends are again writing the Post’s editorials. And not only that: arch neo-con James Woolsey told Lou Dobbs on Aug. 14 that the U.S. may have no choice but to bomb Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program. As Woolsey puts it, “I’m afraid within, well, at worst, a few months; at best, a few years; they could have the bomb.”

Woolsey, self-described “anchor of the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs,” has long been out in front plumbing for wars, like Iraq, that he and other neo-cons myopically see as being in Israel’s, as well as America’s, interest. On the evening of 9/11, Woolsey was already raising with Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings the notion that Iraq was a leading candidate for state sponsorship of the attacks. A day later, Woolsey told journalist James Fallows that, no matter who proved responsible for 9/11, the solution had to include removing Saddam Hussein because he was so likely to be involved the next time (sic).

The latest media hype is also rubbish. And Woolsey knows it. And so do reporters for the Washington Post, who are aware of, but have been forbidden to tell, a highly interesting story about waiting for a key National Intelligence Estimate — as if for Godot.

The NIE That Didn’t Bark

The latest National Intelligence Estimate regarding if and when Iran is likely to have the bomb has been ready since February. It has been sent back four times — no doubt because its conclusions do not support what Cheney and Woolsey are telling the president and, through the domesticated press, telling the rest of us as well.

The conclusion of the most recent published NIE (early 2005) was that Iran probably could not acquire a nuclear weapon until “early to mid-next decade,” a formula memorized and restated by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell at his confirmation hearing in February. One can safely assume that McConnell had been fully briefed on the first “final draft” of the new estimate, which has now been in limbo for half a year. And I would wager that the conclusions of the new estimate resemble those of the NIE of 2005 far too closely to suit Cheney.

It is a scandal that the congressional oversight committees have not been briefed on the conclusions of the new estimate, even though it cannot pass Cheney’s smell test. For it is a safe bet it would give the lie to the claims of Cheney, Woolsey, and other cheerleaders for war with Iran and provide powerful ammunition to those arguing for a more sensible approach to Iran.

But Attacking Iran Would Be Crazy

Despite the administration’s war-like record, many Americans may still cling to the belief that attacking Iran won’t happen because it would be crazy; that Bush is a lame-duck president who wouldn’t dare undertake yet another reckless adventure when the last one went so badly.

But rationality and common sense have not exactly been the strong suit of this administration. Bush has placed himself in a neoconservative bubble that operates with its own false sense of reality. Worse still: as psychiatrist Justin Frank pointed out [2] in the July 27 VIPS memo “Dangers of a Cornered Bush,” updating his book, “Bush on the Couch”:

“We are left with a president who cannot actually govern, because he is incapable of reasoned thought in coping with events outside his control, like those in the Middle East.

“This makes it a monumental challenge — as urgent as it is difficult — not only to get him to stop the carnage in the Middle East, but also to prevent him from undertaking a new, perhaps even more disastrous adventure-like going to war with Iran, in order to embellish the image he so proudly created for himself after 9/11 as the commander in chief of ‘the first war of the 21st century.’”

Scary.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his 27 years as a CIA analyst, he chaired NIEs: he is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). An earlier, shorter version of this piece appeared on Consortiumnews.com.