Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
Our memories not only serve the purpose of learning to avoid danger from past experience, they serve as the glue that holds our sense of our fleeting lives together into a linear personal narrative. For all of us most memories are specific to our direct life experiences. There are some memories though transcending personal encounters and that directly affect us as well as society as a whole. The murder of John F. Kennedy is one such experience from my life that profoundly affected me and my generation, even though all I knew of the man was third hand at best. Closer in time but equally, if not more indelible is the image of the destruction wrought on the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001. I would guess that almost all Americans who were alive on that day know where they were and what they were doing. This past week we passed the eleventh anniversary of this horror and innumerable solemn observances occurred throughout the nation.
I can remember one phrase that began to be used over and over from that day onward and my rising anger at the implications of that phrase. “This Changes Everything”. I’ve not been able to determine what news-person or pundit first uttered those words, but afterwards the phrase reverberated incessantly. As that fateful day passed, what took shape in the meme those words created, was that the United States had undergone an experience that changed all the rules we had purportedly lived by in dealing with the world around us. In effect it was like saying “No more Mr. Nice Guy”. Whether or not our country ever lived by the ideals it purported to live by is another question entirely. My anger rose at the overuse of this meme because I’ve spent my life wanting my country to live by a higher standard in both national and international relations. I correctly saw this meme as an attempted usurpation of this tragedy towards turning our country away from our national ideals, such as they were. As the years passed since 9/11/2001, we have watched the erosion of these America Ideals. Two murderous wars have been waged. Hundreds of thousands have died, or been maimed. Our “national treasure” depleted, torture has become legalized and with the passage of the “Patriot Act” we have watched the demolition of our personal freedom. With this anniversary, two articles appeared nationally that call into question what was really behind 9/11 and also why there was a possibility of deterring it, which was ignored by the G.W. Bush Administration. I want to discuss both of these articles and then add my own thoughts on their real context.
Bob Graham was a Senator from Florida when 9/11 occurred. He was in fact the long time Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the most powerful and important positions in the U.S. Senate:
“Senator Graham opposed the War in Iraq for fear it would divert U.S. attention from the fight in Afghanistan. After reviewing information and meeting with military leaders in February 2002, he decided the war would be a “distraction” that would end poorly. He continues to oppose the Iraq War today.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Graham
The truth has been shown that Iraq was a war of poor choice and that it had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. It is also proven that Iraq had no “weapons of mass destruction” to justify our attack upon that country either. To my mind history has added luster to Senator Graham, as a man who was bravely willing to fight against the flow of “now this changes everything” propaganda and whom history has proven prescient. Therefore I took notice when I saw his byline on this Huffpost article: “Re-Open the 9/11 Investigation Now”
“The passage of time since September 11, 2001, has not diminished the distrust many of us feel surrounding the official story of how 9/11 happened and, more specifically, who financed and supported it. After eleven years, the time has come for the families of the victims, the survivors and all Americans to get the whole story behind 9/11.
Yet the story of who may have facilitated the 19 hijackers and the infrastructure that supported the attacks — a crucial element of the narrative — has not been told. The pieces we do have underscore how much more remains unknown.
Did the hijackers execute the plot alone, or did they have the support of forces other than the known leaders of al-Qaeda — a network even — that provided funds, assistance, and cover?
It is not merely a question of the need to complete the historical record. It is a matter of national security today.”
What Bob Graham was alluding to is that the direct involvement of the Saudi’s in the 9/11 plot, perhaps even governmental. Since it is a kingdom ruled by a huge royal family, the connections between powerful Saudi’s and its government are not apparent to the outsider and highly suspicious. Graham feels that any investigation of further Saudi involvement has been derailed. We all know of the Saudi airplane that was allowed to leave the country on 9/12/2001, removing many parties who should have been directly questioned in the investigation of this terrorist act.
“Thousands of Americans, who suffered unimaginable loss, have been denied their day in court in part because evidence of support was either never gathered by law enforcement or remains locked away, sealed as “Classified.”
From the outset of the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11, it seemed implausible that the hijackers — most of whom spoke no English and had never been to the U.S. — could have executed the heinous plot on their own. The inquiry proved those suspicions justified, and a 28-page chapter in its report centered on sources of foreign support for some of the September 11 hijackers while they were in the United States. That chapter remains censored, denied to the American people.
Sadly, those 28 pages represent only a fraction of the evidence of Saudi complicity that our government continues to shield from the public, under a flawed classification program which appears to be part of a systematic effort to protect Saudi Arabia from any real accountability for its actions. For example, after a nearly eight year delay, the CIA recently responded to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests submitted on behalf of the 9/11 families in 2004, for reports and documents cited in the notes of the 9/11 Commission’s Final Report. Unfortunately, when it came to documents such as a 16-page CIA report titled “Saudi Based Financial Support for Terrorist Organizations,” our own government redacted every word of substantive text.
Despite the carefully orchestrated campaign to protect our Saudi “friends,” ample evidence of Saudi Arabia’s intimate ties to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks has come to light. The executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Dr. Philip Zelikow, stated in 2007 that while at that time he did not feel the evidence established “Saudi government agents,” were involved “there is persuasive evidence of a possible support network.”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-graham/911-saudi-arabia_b_1868863.html
Please read the Graham article and see if you find it as persuasive as I do. There was a second article though, that appeared in the New York Times Op Ed page on September 10, 2012, by Kurt Eichenwald entitled: “The Deafness Before the Storm” Kurt’s premise in this article is that the Bush Administration had clear evidence of the dire possibility of an impending Al Qaeda attack and chose to ignore it. From Eichenwald’s article:
“On Aug. 6, 2001, President George W. Bush received a classified review of the threats posed by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, Al Qaeda. That morning’s “presidential daily brief” — the top-secret document prepared by America’s intelligence agencies — featured the now-infamous heading: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” A few weeks later, on 9/11, Al Qaeda accomplished that goal.”
When the investigation of 9/11 took place the Bush Administration’s position:
“….dismissed the document’s significance, saying that, despite the jaw-dropping headline, it was only an assessment of Al Qaeda’s history, not a warning of the impending attack. While some critics considered that claim absurd, a close reading of the brief showed that the argument had some validity.”
Kurt Eichenwald goes on to write that the Bush Administration’s dismissal of the significance of the document had validity:
“…unless it was read in conjunction with the daily briefs preceding Aug. 6, the ones the Bush administration would not release. While those documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable conclusion: the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came before it.
The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible. But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster.” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html?_r=2&src=twr
Reading this article one sentence resonated with me based on much that I’ve thought about 9/11 and have expressed here in many guest blogs:
“An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration, both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat.”
As I have written here before and will supply background on, in the links at the end of this piece, “The Project for the New American Century” (PNAC) http://jonathanturley.org/2011/07/23/the-american-quest-for-empire/#more-37487was a document that represented the blueprint of the neo-conservative movement to achieve world dominance and achieve their dream of an American Empire established in the Twenty-First Century. With the election of George W. Bush in 2000, the people behind PNAC and the neo-conservative movement found themselves in charge of the Foreign Policy of the Administration and in charge of the Defense Department. Iraq was mentioned in PNAC as one of the regimes that needed to be overthrown to obtain control over its oil resources. PNAC also postulated the need for some calamity akin to the shock of “Pearl Harbor” to gain support from the American People. It is obvious where my train of thought is leading and I will go there, but first to be fair let us take the least damning view of what occurred.
Perhaps the Neo-Conservatives were not behaving duplicitously, but merely could not recognize evidence which differed from their pre-conceptions. If this were the case, then they and the entire Bush Administration were guilty of the grossest incompetence/arrogance in not actively trying to counter the Al Qaeda threat. By this incompetence they then set in motion a tragedy that is ongoing into the present and perhaps distant future. If this least case scenario is what actually happened then these neo-conservatives have forfeited any right to be involved with American Foreign Policy. Unfortunately, they are still overly involved with our country’s foreign policy and many of them are on the Romney Team, while others work for the current administration. All, however, are today interviewed by the media as “foreign policy experts” and thus continue to persist in pushing their distinctly anti-Constitutional doctrine.
Reading these two articles on subsequent days, as 9/11/12 arrived, got me to thinking about what was the truth behind this terrible event about which so many were willing to say “now this changes everything”, which then became a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are many conspiracy theories abounding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories , which you probably know, but can peruse if you will. My life experiences have taught me not to discount the possibilities of almost anything, since so much in life seems so bizarre and so many of what seemed eternal truths in my youth, have lost substance as the years have passed. I’ll let those who wish to comment on these conspiracies have at it below. Here though is my theory on what was the “truth” of 9/11, weaving in the implications of these two articles and my past efforts to explore PNAC and to dissect the warp and woof of this America history we share.
The experiences that World War II had upon those living in America, proved to be trans-formative for many in the Conservative establishment. Liberals, via the Progressive Tradition, embodied by Teddy Roosevelt, were already on board with the idea of the United States as an international power. Both conservative and liberal visions were capitalist in outlook and elitist in conception. Though the elitism was played down in our electoral processes, so as not to offend the majority of voters, it comes through historically overtly and covertly. Prior to this war the American conservatives were mainly isolationist, although both American continents were viewed as our bailiwicks. With World War II came the realization of the profits to be made in defense contracting and also necessarily the interweaving of business men with governmental operations.
The conservative isolationists had always seen the socialist and communist movements in our country as dangerous to their corporate interests. FDR’s “New Deal” had mollified those elements by bringing them into the process. The defeat of the German’s as they invaded Russia morphed into a rout and in the process established the USSR as a world power, second only to the U.S. At least two years before the end of World War II both conservative and liberal foreign policy “realists” were urging that our country prepare to do battle with the spectra of a world communist movement radiating out of the USSR. The former isolationists changed their outlook and joined in common cause with the progressive internationalists among the U.S. elite. This is where the whole concept of a “bi-partisan” foreign policy arose. This “bi-partisanship” among the American foreign policy establishment lasted in the Presidency’s and in the Congress until the Viet Nam War, when some in the “foreign Policy” elite on the Left began to re-think their premises.
In truth the “re-thinking” had always existed, but began in earnest in the 1950’s, as “Progressivism” transformed itself from the Teddy Roosevelt concept of the duty of the Anglo-Saxon elite to impose their superior culture onto a barbaric world, thus uplifting it to just below our standards of superiority. This transformation led to an agreement among most progressives about the realization that our culture is not superior to other cultures and in fact perhaps all cultures can learn something from other cultures. This came along with the rejection of imperialism and the dismantling of empires small and large.
Establishments being what they are, difficult to dislodge, the “bi-partisan” consensus remained among the established elite, forged by the lessons of Neville Chamberlain’s Munich debacle. “Hawkish” Democrats like Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoop_Jackson joined together with Republican “Hawks” to promote an aggressive American Foreign Policy and prosecute the “Cold War”, overtly and covertly. That this aggressive policy seemed to perfectly dovetail with private America economic interest’s world wide was not just an added benefit of this policy, but actually was intertwined into the impetus for its continuance. There was money to be made in feeding the hunger of the Defense Department and the ever growing intelligence establishment. There were economic interests to be advanced world wide in controlling other country’s natural resources and in destabilizing governments who weren’t receptive to the economic control of the growing International Corporate exploitation. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the “Cold War” removed the “raison d’etre” of the “Defense Hawks”. Despite the “Reagan did it” mythology, spread about for political purposes, the collapse was really about the inability of Communist leadership to hide from their people the deficiency’s of their oppressive system and thus a collapse in the myth of a “worker’s paradise”.
With the “Cold War” over and with the rise to prominence of formidable nations vying for economic superiority, the aims of the “Hawkish Elite” to maintain American dominance needed new material to weave into a mythology of justification for American hegemony, which by then really meant multinational corporate hegemony over nation states. We thus had the merger of neo-Liberal and neo-Conservative foreign policy administrators, advisers and experts, who came together to formulate this mythology of America Empire for the sake of humanity. Its’ intellectual apogee was in the PNAC document and the events subsequent to it as discussed above.
The election of George W. Bush brought those behind PNAC into power. They were, by their own admission in 1998, looking for a national tragedy akin to Pearl Harbor, which would rally the nation together under their banner and give impetus for “a new American Century” where our country would become the world’s dominant empire. 9/11 came and off they went. However, in the world view of most American’s, which sees this country as the center of the all the activity on this Earth, we perhaps miss the other possibilities that exist. As backward as Saudi Arabia is from a socio-religious perspective, their leadership is and always has been quite sophisticated. Through the years this sophistication has led them to use their wealth to buy our politicians and to even buy our media institutions like CNN. They have had long standing economic partnerships with the Bush Family for instance, and to us down here it is not quite clear who the dominant partner is, but my bet is on the Saudi’s being in effect the employer, of employees who aren’t fully aware of their subservience. These economic relationships extend to almost all of the signatories to PNAC.
My propositions are that the Saudi government or powerful forces within it, understanding PNAC’s implications, were delighted by and financially supported George Bush’s ascension to the Presidency. With Dick Cheney really in charge of the incompetent and malleable Bush, the Saudi’s saw their opportunity to gain their long cherished hegemony in the Middle East, by using its American tool to do the heavy lifting of making war. They helped devise and financially backed the Al Qaeda plan to attack the World Trade Center. Their neo-con minions so focused on their desire to impose the American will upon the world, misled perhaps by the Saudi Intelligence Agency, ignored the obvious information before them and attacked Iraq, which was led by the Saudi’s number one contender for Middle Eastern hegemony, Saddam Hussein. Afghanistan, not part of the Saudi’s original plan, was set upon by the Neo Cons after it became apparent that the now destroyed Iraq wasn’t behind 9/11. The Afghanistan bonus was the potential for the estimated three trillion dollars of vital natural resources under their mountain ranges.
The war drums are beating again to attack the last Muslim competitor for Middle East Hegemony, Iran. If Iran is neutralized, or defeated, the Saudi’s will have become a Middle Eastern Empire, which no doubt is their goal. The United States will have continued to play its Hessian like role for the Saudi Empire as we try to enforce a “Pax Americana” on the world, though despite our own egotistic national pretensions we are merely the “hired help”.
9/11 really did change everything, but not as most expected. This country has shredded our Constitution in the name of a “War on Terror”. We have renounced the “Geneva Conventions” and the “Judgments at Nuremburg”. We have become a warlike nation, striving for empire and seeing the deaths of hundreds of thousands as collateral damage. We have sold out a dedicated generation of young Americans who have willing fought for a cause, that their war experience shows them is false and with that experience they’ve reacted with PTSD and an unholy high rate of suicide. I could go on, but if you haven’t gotten the bitter irony of it all as yet, you never will.
Below are links within which all the documentation I’ve used to back up my contentions can be found:
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/09/08/the-drum-beat-goes-on/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/08/25/lest-we-forget/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/06/23/missing-the-point-when-the-point-is-obvious/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/03/17/a-real-history-of-the-last-sixty-two-years/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/02/11/twitters-arab-winter/
http://jonathanturley.org/2011/09/10/the-president-has-been-afraid-of-what/
http://jonathanturley.org/2011/07/23/the-american-quest-for-empire/
Photo credit should read DOUG KANTER/AFP/Getty Images
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
Gene,
Aww… now you’re going and being all agreeable… How can I argue with you when you’re right? 🙁
Otteray Scribe,
You mean to say that a forgotten war/half-assed attempt at nation building in the Graveyard of Empire isn’t a good idea? Who would have thunk it?
Slarti,
Although I disagree with Sam about free will (as we’ve previously discussed), I think as a pragmatic matter applying retroactive analysis of effect is far more critical than finding intent to determining guilt or innocence. Intent is rarely a determinative factor at law. There are exceptions of course like first degree murder (where intent is an element of the crime) or conspiracy (where knowledge of action in furtherance can be a material issue) but by in large intent is irrelevant to remediation of the harm done by a bad actor to individuals and society. At best, it can (and often should) serve as mitigation at sentencing, but it should usually be left aside for factual and legal determinations of guilt or innocence.
Gene,
Ooh—you got me with a Heinlein quote! Bonus points for you! The Margret Atwood quote is basically what I was trying to say in my last comment.
Gene,
I believe you are totally overestimating their capacity for self-awareness as a statistical matter.
Personally, I feel that too much emphasis is placed on intent—if we dispensed with the idea of free will (as Sam Harris suggests) and just judged actions by their results, I think we would be a lot better off.
Slarti,
Except . . . I’m not disagreeing with Mike in toto. Just on the one statement. In a group as large as PNAC, at least a couple of them have to be aware of the true nature of their actions. That is my contention. I still follow Heinlein’s Razor, “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don’t rule out malice.” However, I am mindful of Margret Atwood at the same time. “Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”
The past few weeks have had me thinking about my fourth grade history class. The Hundred Years War. We are headed that way ourselves. Some of the troops fighting and dying in Afghanistan were not even born when we fought the Desert Storm war. Think about that. We have been dumping national treasure and the lives of American kids into the Middle East almost non-stop for 21 years. How much longer until we are broke?
Afghanistan: Where empires go to die.
Gene,
I have to agree with Mike here—I think that the events leading up to and following 9/11 can be explained by ignorance which rises to the level of incompetence, negligence which borders on criminal, a truly epic level of stupidity, a level blind fanaticism that has often led to tragic results, and a whole bunch of selfish opportunism. Stir in a liberal helping of propaganda (which is perfectly okay to the “ends justify the means” crowd) and walla-walla* the country is totally FUBAR. Given the strength of some of the confirmation biases that I’ve seen, I have no reason to believe that these events require any actors who’s intent is malevolent in their own mind.
Remember that while you are insufficiently unaware to have done these sort of things without knowing your actions were evil in their effects, you are in the tail of the bell curve on this one. I can think of many people (some who post on this blog) who would do great evil were they in positions of power—simply by acting with the best of intentions untempered by sufficient understanding. If you throw in people acting selfishly (assuming you agree that is not evil per se), a great deal of evil can be done by greedy, ignorant fools who see themselves as righteous.
* as my high school calc teacher Mr. Steidle used to say…
“I had for some reason, perhaps because Ishmael only worked on occasional tips from the analysis side, but mostly from those he made himself, assumed that the analysis side of CIA was not so dysfunctional as the ops side.”
ID707,
You raise a good point, but let me riff on it a bit as also an extension of my last comment to Gene. The CIA began as an “Old Boys” network taken mainly from the American Elite who not only went to the same private schools, but also to Yale and Harvard. They were recruited while at University by Professors who also worked in intelligence. This was how George H.W. Bush was recruited and how William F. Buckley was recruited.
Being homogeneously WASP, “upper-class”, their attitudes were shaped by their upbringing of privilege. Their worldview was thus limited in their view of those other than members of their own class, or nation. Being a “good fellow” (having the right background and family) was often more important that being particularly smart and people were promoted way above their level of competence. The Saudi’s were smart enough to send their own sons to be educated with the “elite” in America, as did many other dynasties. This was why when it came to intelligence agencies, the CIA was far less adept than let’s say the NKVD, Mossad and Saudi Intelligence.
I think we are mostly on the same page, Mike. I understand the problem of the “logic proof element”, but even so, I think in PNAC in particular there are some of those people who wake up every morning and their first thought of the day is “How can I see the world burn and how can I take personal advantage of it?” So my laughter wasn’t at the thesis of your article in general, just at the idea that at least some of PNAC doesn’t know them for exactly what they are. There are least a couple of Heydrichs there – true mustache twirling villains. That or I am totally overestimating their capacity for self-awareness as a statistical matter. 😀
“I suspect way more than one of them is self-aware enough to know what they are doing is simply evil by any reasonable ethical standard.”
Gene,
Of late I’ve had something of a political epiphany about those we both oppose and about plots like PNAC. To defeat an enemy, make no mistake about it I see them as “The Enemy”, one has to get an understanding of their thinking. When it comes to America, you and I both agree that it is run by a Corporate Oligarchy trying to return us to a feudal state. However, what I come to see more and more, is that from their perspective they have the moral high ground and possessing not only justifies their actions, but makes them imperative.
The elite in this country has every right to believe in the “American Dream” and “American Exceptionalism”, they’ve lived it in their lives. Their friends have lived it and they have grow up going to the same elite schools and Universities. Certainly there are many Universities that are the educational equal of Harvard and Yale, but going to those two is an almost guarantee of successful careers and entree into the American elite. Why would the elite not think that they are smarter/better than the masses and that America has been chosen to lead the world? They would see it as a duty. Teddy Roosevelt,
who can be called the “Father of the American Progressive Movement” actually wrote about the duty of the superior Anglo-Saxon strain to impose their wisdom and their will on lesser folk.
I don’t have the energy after writing my longest blog to fully flesh this out, but I trust your intelligence to see what I’m getting at. These people believe that the evil (as you and I see it) that they do is “good”. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t see them as the bad people that they are, but it does mean that in countering them we need to understand that by their lights they’re doing the right thing and we are the evil people. In the end it means the old standby’s of winning the argument with logic simply don’t work against people who can’t comprehend they’ve lost the argument. It also means we can never relax when we achieve a victory, since these folk will just keep striving.
As an example when in the 50’s pornography laws were overturned and the American people were allowed to read great authors like James Joyce, Henry Miller, William Burroughs and D.H. Lawrence, we though the book banners had been banished. We see today that is not the case.
Reblogged this on cadesertvoice and commented:
The war drums are beating again to attack the last Muslim competitor for Middle East Hegemony, Iran. If Iran is neutralized, or defeated, the Saudi’s will have become a Middle Eastern Empire, which no doubt is their goal. The United States will have continued to play its Hessian like role for the Saudi Empire as we try to enforce a “Pax Americana” on the world, though despite our own egotistic national pretensions we are merely the “hired help”.
9/11 really did change everything, but not as most expected. This country has shredded our Constitution in the name of a “War on Terror”. We have renounced the “Geneva Conventions” and the “Judgments at Nuremburg”. We have become a warlike nation, striving for empire and seeing the deaths of hundreds of thousands as collateral damage. We have sold out a dedicated generation of young Americans who have willing fought for a cause, that their war experience shows them is false and with that experience they’ve reacted with PTSD and an unholy high rate of suicide. I could go on, but if you haven’t gotten the bitter irony of it all as yet, you never will.
Mike S.,
Great job. As Gene suggested, I think most of these Kool Aid drinking neocons know or knew how evil their desires were, but they could not help lusting for it. Everything did change with 9/11. Our civil liberties were reduced, our coffers were raided and the plutocracy is now bowing down at the Romney altar in hopes of gutting what is left of the middle class. There are also far too many on the left “worshipping” at that same altar.
MikeS, Lotta, and Dredd,
I have not considered foreign policy’s path other than considering it steered by those with correct accents and connections (no envy there!). Your insights widen mine.
I have just begun RE-reading “The Human Factor” by Ishmael Jones, regarding the “CIA’s dysfunctional intelligence culture”. He functioned within that culture, in a for career purposes inept selection of deep cover agent’s job outside of HQ, in order to do what he wanted to do. Aid America in getting info on WMD tech status from rogue
nations.
His book is written without CIA permission and without their indicating, if any, their specific objections to its publication. It is aimed to reveal the dysfunctionality, the reasons therefore, and ends with a long appendix where he specifies in detail the changes needed. He has worked since retirement striving to inform congress, et al about these needs.
To his credit, he “managed” HQ and his job apparently successfully as he remained in the field an almost record length of time, moving between the op areas.
To give some chocks: The USA never placed or recruited an agent in place in the USSR. The only ones we had, had to knock down the door (almost literally) to be recruited.
The USSR, among others, have had several here, 3 in the CIA, and one in the FBI, that revealed all our agents in the USSR, who then if not eliminated could be used to send false information to us. The USSR knew through its agents here of all our counterint moves, like the famed Berlin tunnel to tap their comm lines.
Point???
I had for some reason, perhaps because Ishmael only worked on occasional tips from the analysis side, but mostly from those he made himself, assumed that the analysis side of CIA was not so dysfunctional as the ops side.
This does not hold water in view of what you reveal of our foreign policy. We are disinformed, ineffectual and terribly expensive to boot.
We, in effect, are the bull in the china shop being led to the desired china tiers to be toppled at the wishes of others with our brute strength.
One analogy can not capture a nation of fools.
Those looking for a tale of derringdo, don’t bother. The job of a field officer is dangerous but not like James Bond’s. Read another book insteaed.
Mike,
At an individual level? Sure, I’ll buy that. But at a level of complexity (i.e. scale of organization and raw number of participants) of PNAC? I suspect way more than one of them is self-aware enough to know what they are doing is simply evil by any reasonable ethical standard. We’ve had similar discussions before so I’m going to harken back to one of them for a reference. In PNAC, I suspect there are a lot more Heydrichs than there are Hitlers. I could be wrong, but looking at the consequences of their plans that they did manage to effect (all of which were/are reasonably foreseeable) leads to think otherwise.
“the line “[p]erhaps the Neo-Conservatives were not behaving duplicitously, but merely could not recognize evidence which differed from their pre-conceptions” made me laugh so hard I dragon’s breathed my coffee.”
Gene,
Sorry about the digestive upset. I think one of the biggest problems we have in parsing what is really going on is the use of the “Good vs. Evil” meme. That is not to say that there aren’t any ethical standards, or acts that can be deemed “good” or “evil”, just that we label ignorant, or stupid actions and beliefs too often as if they are the work of “bad” people. By “bad” I mean people who are consciously malevolent. I don’t believe that for the most part even sociopaths consciously are trying to do bad things, it’s just their perspective and lack of empathy allow them to see what they do as necessary and justified. To me the problem with the Neocons is that they are people who
are captive of an ideology that clouds their vision of the world and at the same time think of themselves as brilliantly perceptive. The most dangerous people are those who are stupid and think they are smart.
Mike, what Mark said. First rate article. However, the line “[p]erhaps the Neo-Conservatives were not behaving duplicitously, but merely could not recognize evidence which differed from their pre-conceptions” made me laugh so hard I dragon’s breathed my coffee.
Mike Spindell 1, September 15, 2012 at 11:02 am
…
Our false sense of our own cultural superiority, in tandem with our ignorance of the historical depth of these cultures, causes America to underestimate who we are dealing with.
…
Our foreign policy “experts”, puffed up with their sense of cultural superiority are but puppets in their hands.
=============================================
Reminds me of consequences.
Also reminds me of what Tom Englehardt wrote about this week:
(Tom Dispatch). As you say “our foreign policy ‘experts'” are forgetting that these one night stands (dictators like Mubarak, Karzai, Saudi Royalty, etc. ad nauseum), compared with “the long eye” visionaries, as lottakatz put it, will reap trouble once we arm these one night stands to the teeth.
And once they turn on those foreign policy experts.
Who will be busy looking for the bad guys in the U.S. via their spy empire they have built here to watch us.
Arming probable eventual enemies while harassing the faithful citizens is a fools errand they seem to unwittingly relish.
Dredd and ID707,
Thank you for your complements and especially for injecting the prescience and experience of Craig Paul Roberts into the discussion.
“We publicly build our political reality in two year increments, our elites build it decades at a time and some other countries, older and more practiced, set their goals on generational time-lines.”
LK,
Thank you for expanding upon the central theme of my piece. Supplying the background of the change in American conservatives foreign policy views. Once the former isolationists joined across party lines with the liberal internationalists the inexorable march towards a concept of American Empire had begun.
The problem underlying that, aside from the destruction of the Founding Father’s vision, was that in their exultation of American Exceptionalism they viewed other peoples of the world as being less capable than we. Having the most powerful armed forces is only a reflection of military might, rather than strategic intelligence. Time after time, in our egocentric America sense of our superiority, this country has been led down the wrong path by factions in other peoples seeking their own aims.
In South America we kept toppling regimes that were deemed uncooperative by our corporations, such as United Fruit. We put into power those who would be more amenable to the presence of corporate exploiters. Yet who was the “user” and who was the “used”? Thugs like Batista, Marcos and Trujillo reigned over their countries for decades and their excesses were aided by American support. Were they merely “stupid Brown gangsters” acting as puppets, or perhaps sophisticated political players aiming for power? Our false sense of our own cultural superiority, in tandem with our ignorance of the historical depth of these cultures, causes America to underestimate who we are dealing with.
As you pointed out the Saudi Dynasty has a long history of reaching and attaining power/wealth. With multiple wives, a given patriarch within the family produces dozens of children, providing a cadre of relative dedicated towards advancement of the family’s interests. We have long known, through writer’s like Machiavelli and Shakespeare, of the political sophistication of nobility and their dynasties. The singular purpose of a dynasty is to perpetuate itself through the ages. Therefore as you expressed they take the “long view”.
The Saudi’s, with their traditional Arab trappings and suffocating religious beliefs, do seem backwards to us. That is merely a facade put up for public consumption. Behind the scenes lies perhaps the most sophisticated political players in the world. Our foreign policy “experts”, puffed up with their sense of cultural superiority are but puppets in their hands.