The “Free Press” in Action
In Latin America last year, there were two events that each produced 43 casualties. Which elicited greater outrage?
For the U.S. media, it was the “violent crackdown” leaving “43 people dead” (NPR) in “an autocratic, despotic state” (New York Times ) run by “extremists” (Washington Post ). Surely these charges were leveled at Mexico, where 43 student activists were murdered in Iguala last September. In their forthcoming A Narco History, Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace describe how the victims, “packed into two pick-up trucks,” were driven to a desolate ravine. Over a dozen “died en route, apparently from asphyxiation,” and the rest “were shot, one after another,” around 2:00 a.m. The killers tossed the corpses into a gorge, torched them, and maintained the fire “through the night and into the following afternoon,” leaving only “ashes and bits of bone, which were then pulverized.”
Initial blame went to local forces—Iguala’s mayor and his wife, area police and drug gangs. But reporters Anabel Hernández and Steve Fisher, after reviewing thousands of pages of official documents, reached a different conclusion. Hernández explained “that the federal police and the federal government [were] also involved,” both “in the attack” and in “monitoring the students” the night of the slaughter. Fisher added that the Mexican government based its account of the massacre on testimonies of “witnesses who had been directly tortured.”
The Hernández-Fisher findings reflect broader problems plaguing the country. “Torture and ill-treatment in Mexico is out of control with a 600 per cent rise in the number of reported cases in the past decade,” Amnesty International warned last September, pointing to “a prevailing culture of tolerance and impunity.” The UN concurred this month, and “sharply rebuked Mexico for its widespread problem with torture, which it said implicates all levels of the security apparatus,” Jo Tuckman wrote in the Guardian.
Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, has done his part to escalate state violence. He gave the orders, while governor of México State, for what Francisco Goldman calls “one of the most squalid instances of government brutality in recent years”—the May 2006 assault on the Atenco municipality. Some 3,500 state police rampaged against 300 flower vendors, peasants and their sympathizers, beating them until they blacked out and isolating women for special treatment. Amnesty International reported “23 cases of sexual violence during the operation,” including one woman a trio of policemen surrounded. “All three of them raped her with their fingers,” a witness recalled.
Peña Nieto responded by asserting “that the manuals of radical groups say that in the case of women [if they are arrested], they should say they’ve been raped.” Amnesty stumbled into a trap laid by attention-desperate women, in his opinion. Regarding Atenco, he stressed: “It was a decision that I made personally to reestablish order and peace, and I made it with the legitimate use of force that corresponds to the state.” Surely this is the “autocratic, despotic state” the New York Times criticized.
The paper’s archives lay bare its views—that Peña Nieto can “do a lot of good,” given his “big promises of change” and “commendable” economic agenda. The Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth interviewed Mexico’s president just before the Iguala bloodbath, dubbing him “a hero in the financial world.” A Post editorial praised his ability to summon the “courage” necessary to transform Mexico into “a model of how democracy can serve a developing country.” The Post clarified, with a straight face, that Peña Nieto displayed his bravery by ignoring “lackluster opinion polls” as he pushed through unpopular reforms—a truly “functional democracy,” without question. There was no serious censure of the Mexican president in these papers, in other words. The charges of despotism and extremism, quoted above, were in fact leveled at Venezuela—the site of the other episode last year resulting in 43 Latin American casualties.
But these demonstrations, from February until July, were dramatically different from the Mexican student incineration. What, in the NPR version, was “a violent crackdown last year against antigovernment protesters,” in fact—on planet Earth—was a mix of “pro- and anti-government protests” (Amnesty International) that “left 43 people dead in opposing camps” (Financial Times ). “There are deaths on both sides of the political spectrum,” Jake Johnston, a researcher with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, affirmed, noting that “members of Venezuelan security forces have been implicated and subsequently arrested for their involvement.” He added that several people were apparently “killed by crashing into barricades, from wires strung across streets by protesters and in some cases from having been shot trying to remove barricades.” Half a dozen National Guardsmen died.
In the wake of these demonstrations, the Post railed against “economically illiterate former bus driver” Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president, for his “hard-fisted response to the unrest” and “violent repression.” The New York Times lamented his “government’s abuses”—which “are dangerous for the region and certainly warrant strong criticism from Latin American leaders”—while Obama, a year after the protests, declared Venezuela a national security threat. His March 9 executive order, William Neuman wrote in the Times, targets “any American assets belonging to seven Venezuelan law enforcement and military officials who it said were linked to human rights violations.”
Compare Obama’s condemnation of Maduro to his reaction to the Iguala murders. When asked, in mid-December, whether U.S. aid to Mexico should be conditioned on human rights, he emphasized that “the best thing we can do is to be a good partner”—since bloodshed there “does affect us,” after all. The Times followed up after Obama hosted the Mexican president at the White House on January 6, noting that “Mr. Peña Nieto’s visit to Washington came at a time of increased cooperation between the United States and Mexico.”
This cooperation has won some major victories over the decades. NAFTA shattered poor farming communities in Mexico, for example, while promoting deforestation, environmentally ruinous mining—and corporate profits. In 2007, U.S. official Thomas Shannon stated that “armoring NAFTA” is the goal of Washington’s security assistance, which “totaled $2.5 billion between FY2008 and FY2015,” the Congressional Research Service reported. The result is a death zone, with perhaps some 120,000 intentional killings during the Felipe Calderón presidency (2006-2012). Tijuana’s Zeta Magazine published a study claiming the slayings have actually increased under Peña Nieto, and the nightmare has deepened to the point where the murder rate “exceeds that of Iraq,” according to Molly Molloy.
None of these developments infuriated Washington like those in Venezuela, to be sure. After Chávez’s first decade in power, “the poverty rate ha[d] been cut by more than half” and “social spending per person more than tripled,” while unemployment and infant mortality declined, the Center for Economic and Policy Research determined. And the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean found, in May 2010, that Venezuela had the region’s most equal income distribution. In Mexico a year later, the Los Angeles Times noted, “poverty [was] steadily on the rise.” Throughout this period, Washington’s aims included “dividing Chavismo,” “protecting vital US business,” and “isolating Chavez internationally,” as former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield outlined the strategy in 2006.
Reviewing this foreign policy record in light of recent Mexico and Venezuela coverage makes one thing obvious. There is, most definitely, a free press in the U.S.—it’s free to print whatever systematic distortions it likes, so long as these conform to Washington’s aims.
Nick Alexandrov lives in Washington, DC. He can be reached at: nicholas.alexandrov@gmail.com
March 20, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | Mexico, New York Times, NPR, Obama, United States, Venezuela, Washington Post |
Leave a comment
The following is the Declaration of the Extraordinary Summit of the Heads of States and Government of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – People’s Commerce Treaty (ALBA – TCP)
We, the heads of state and government, representatives of the member countries of ALBA, gathered on March 17, 2015 in Caracas, Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, declare:
1. Our rejection of the Executive Order issued on March 9, 2015 by the Government of the United States of America, on the basis that this Executive Order is unjustified and unjust, which constitutes a threat of interference that runs counter to the principle of sovereignty and the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of states.
2. Our commitment to the application of international law, a peaceful resolution to conflicts, and the principles of non-intervention that call on all governments to act within the framework of the universal principles and the Charter of the United Nations, in particular the necessity and willingness for governments to abstain from employing unilateral coercive measures that violate international law.
3. Our sovereign and sincere request that the government of the United States accept and engage in dialogue with the government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela as an alternative to conflict and confrontation, based on ongoing respect for the sovereignty and self-determination of the peoples of independent nation-states.
4. Our proposal to create a Facilitator’s Group comprised of institutions from our hemisphere (CELAC, UNASUR, ALBA-TCP, and CARICOM) in order to facilitate an earnest diplomacy between the governments of the United States of America and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in order to reduce tensions and guarantee a friendly solution.
As such, we decided to:
1. Ratify our commitment and unconditional support with the sister nation of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in search of the mechanisms for dialogue with the government of the United States, so that the aggressions by that government against Venezuela cease.
2. Reaffirm that Latin America and the Caribbean is a Region of Peace, where nations are driving processes of integration and friendly relations, with the aim of continuing to guarantee that greatest amount of happiness for our peoples.
3. Emphasize that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela does not represent a threat to any country, being a country that practices solidarity, that has shown its spirit of cooperation with the people and governments of the whole region, becoming a guarantee of social peace and stability for our continent.
4. Demand that the government of the United States immediately cease the harassment and aggression against the government and people of Venezuela, as that policy encourages destabilization and the use of violence by a section of the Venezuelan opposition.
5. Highlight that the Executive Order approved by the president of the United States, Barack Obama, flagrantly ignores the “Declaration of Solidarity and Support for Democratic Institutions, Dialogue, and Peace in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela” approved by the Permanent Council of the OAS on March 7, 2014.
6. Denounce the vicious international media campaign against the sister Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and its government, designed to discredit the Bolivarian Revolution, attempting to create the conditions for a larger scale intervention and counter to a peaceful solution of differences.
7. Reiterate the strongest support for the democratically-elected and legitimate government of the president of the sister Federative Republic of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, while contributing to the strengthening and consolidation of democratic values and principles of freedom and solidarity in Our America.
8. Express our deepest words of solidarity and support for the president of the Argentine Republic, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and the rest of her government officials, who are being subjected to a campaign of personal and institutional discrediting by a section of the political and media right-wing in her country, at the same time as they are being attacked by vulture funds and international financial capital.
9. Applaud the constructive dialogue held during the 20th Meeting of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS), held in Antigua, Guatemala on March 10, 2015, which dealt with the disproportional Executive Order signed by the president of the United States, Barack Obama, against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
10. Instruct the Ambassadors of the member countries of ALBA-TCP throughout the world to conduct an informational and publicity campaign covering the truth about what is happening in Venezuela, and the threats that loom over it and the region.
11. Urge social, worker, student, rural worker, indigenous, and women’s movements to mobilize in a permanent fashion and remain vigilante in order to inform the whole world and the people of Our America that Venezuela and the legitimate government of Nicolas Maduro are not alone and that the peoples of the world categorically reject this new imperialist intervention in the Greater Homeland, whose consequences could be dire for peace and stability in the region.
12. Reaffirm that ALBA-TCP will continue promoting unity, integration, solidarity, and peaceful coexistence as an expression of the ideal and commitment of Latin America and the Caribbean for the building of a peaceful region and a world, as the foundation for the consolidation of relations between peoples.
In addition, we declare and reiterate, in the context of an effective commitment to avoiding confrontation, our support for the “Letter to the People of the United States: Venezuela is not a threat” issued by the government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in particular where it refers to the following aspects:
a) The commitment of Venezuela to freedom, independence, and multilateralism
b) Venezuela’s fundamental belief in peace, national sovereignty, and international law
c) The reality of Venezuela as an open and democratic society according to its Constitution and the aspirations of its people
d) The long-standing friendship of Venezuela with the people of the United States
e) The false, unjust, unilateral, and disproportional action encompassed in the Executive Order of the government of the United States of America where Venezuela is declared to be a threat to the national security of the United States of America
f) The declaration by Venezuela that its sovereignty is sacred.
As a consequence, we the leaders of ALBA-TCP are in solidarity with Venezuela. We understand our fundamental freedoms and assert our rights. We unequivocally support Venezuela in the defense of its sovereignty and independence and the fact it does this standing tall and not on its knees.
To that effect, we ask the government of the United States of America, and specifically President Barack Obama, to repeal the Executive Order approved on March 9, 2015, which constitutes a threat to sovereignty and an intervention in the internal affairs of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
Approved in the city of Caracas, Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, March 17, 2015
March 18, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | Latin America, United States, Venezuela |
1 Comment
The White House is exempting one of its key offices from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) regulations which allow for the full or partial disclosure of previously undisclosed information and documents controlled by the United States government.
The White House said the move to exempt the Office of Administration from the FOIA rules is consistent with court rulings according to which the office is not subject to the transparency law.
In 2009, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled that the office was exempt from the FOIA but made it obligatory for the White House to archive the e-mails to be released under the Presidential Records Act not until at least five years after the end of the administration.
The White House announces its decision in a notice to be published in Tuesday’s Federal Register, saying it will no longer act in accordance with regulations on how the office complies with FOIA requests based on “well-settled legal interpretations.”
However, the timing of the decision raises a question among transparency advocates amid a national debate over the preservation of Obama administration records.
“It is completely out of step with the president’s supposed commitment to transparency,” said Anne Weismann of the liberal Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). “That is a critical office, especially if you want to know, for example, how the White House is dealing with e-mail.”
White House record-keeping duties like the archiving of e-mails as well as other types of activities are handled by the Office of Administration. The office has been subjected to the FOIA regulations for about three decades.
“This is an office that operated under the FOIA for 30 years, and when it became politically inconvenient, they decided they weren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act anymore,” said Tom Fitton of the conservative Judicial Watch.
Late in the Bush administration, CREW sued over about 22 million e-mails which were deleted by the White House. At first, the White House began to comply with that request, but then changed its course of action.
“The government made an argument in an effort to throw everything and the kitchen sink into the lawsuit in order to stop the archiving of White House e-mails,” said Tom Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
The university has used analogous requests to help foreign policy decisions come to light.
March 17, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite | Obama, United States |
1 Comment
Targeted killings have been a central part of U.S. national security strategy for more than a decade, but the American public still knows scandalously little about who the government kills, and why. Today we’re filing a new lawsuit in our continuing fight to fix that.
The CIA and the military use drones to target suspected “militants,” “insurgents,” and “terrorists” in at least half a dozen countries. American drone strikes have killed thousands of people abroad, many of them children. The program has engendered pervasive fear and anger against the United States in countries where the attacks frequently occur.
Our government’s deliberative and premeditated killings – and the many more civilian deaths from the strikes – raise profound legal and ethical questions that ought to be the subject of public debate. The Obama administration has made numerous promises of greater transparency and oversight on drones. In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama pledged to make lethal targeting “more transparent to the American people and the world” because “in our democracy, no one should just take my word for it that we’re doing things the right way.”
But the administration has failed to follow through on these commitments to openness, and it is continuing to withhold basic information. When it has released anything – or been compelled to by lawsuits – discussion of crucial aspects of the program have been omitted or redacted. This lack of transparency makes the public reliant on the government’s self-serving and sometimes false representations about the targeted-killing program.
That’s why today the ACLU filed a new lawsuit to enforce a Freedom of Information Act request asking for basic information on the program, including records on how the government picks targets, before-the-fact assessments of potential civilian casualties, and “after-action” investigations into who was actually killed.
The ACLU has made some headway for transparency. We are litigating two other FOIA lawsuits seeking information about targeted killings. One of them is about the strikes that killed three Americans in Yemen: Anwar al-Aulaqi, his 16-year old son Abdulrahman, and Samir Khan. Despite the public promises of openness, the government has continued to fight tooth-and-nail against releasing documents in those cases – or in some instances, even admitting that it has any documents at all.
In both cases we have won important rulings in federal appeals courts, forcing the government to release some documents, including a 41-page Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memo addressing the legal theories that were the basis for the extrajudicial killing of Anwar al-Aualqi. The belated publication of the memo was an important victory for transparency, which led to a broad and long-overdue debate about the lawfulness of the government’s targeted-killing program and, in particular, of the lawfulness of the government’s deliberate and pre-meditated killing of a U.S. citizen. But the memo – almost a third of which was redacted – leaves many questions unanswered.
For example, the memo doesn’t explain the government’s definition of imminence, the circumstances that would make “capture infeasible” (and therefore, according to the government, lethal targeting permissible), or the reasons for the government’s targeting decisions. Worse, it points to a whole body of secret law that the administration continues to shield from the American public.
The administration’s subsequent gestures towards transparency are just as scant. The public summary of the secret Presidential Policy Guidance – which sets new standards for lethal targeting – relies on the same conclusory definitions as the Office of Legal Counsel memo. In a major speech at the National Defense University in 2013, the president asserted that “before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured – the highest standard we can set.” But multiple investigative reports contradict this assurance. The government could dispute these findings, but instead it chooses to keep nearly all the details about how the program works hidden from view.
We aren’t giving up. One of the most important aspects of our new lawsuit is that it covers more recent documents, including the Presidential Policy Guidance under which the targeted killing program likely now operates.
The government’s drone program lives far too deep in the shadows. As long as the government continues its campaign of secret, unacknowledged lethal strikes across the globe, we will fight to subject this policy to the scrutiny and debate it deserves.
March 16, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | Human rights, Obama, United States |
1 Comment
In a significant change in reporting at The New York Times, the newspaper yesterday became the first major news outlet in the English language media to report on what the rest of the governments in the Western Hemisphere think of U.S. policy toward Venezuela.
This is potentially important because this part of the story, which has heretofore been ignored, could begin to change many people’s perceptions of what is behind the problems in U.S.-Venezuelan relations, if other journalists begin to report on it. The Obama administration is more isolated in Latin America than even George W. Bush was, but hardly anyone who depends on the major hemispheric media would know that, because the point of view of governments other than the U.S. is not reported.
The Times article contains this very succinct and eloquent comment on the new U.S. sanctions against Venezuela from Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa:
“It ought to be a joke in bad taste that reminds us of the darkest hours of our America, when we received invasions and dictatorships imposed by the imperialists,” Mr. Correa wrote. “Can’t they understand that Latin America has changed?”
The last line really sums up the situation: They really don’t understand that Latin America has changed. One can follow all the foreign policy debates in Washington about Latin America, in the media or in journals such as Foreign Affairs, and there really is almost no acknowledgment of the new reality. In this sense the discussion of hemispheric relations is different from most other areas of U.S. foreign policy, e.g., Afghanistan, Iraq, even Israel and Palestine – where there is at least some debate that reaches the intelligentsia and the public. (The new Cold War with Russia is perhaps exceptional in the pervasiveness of a sheep-like mentality and uniformity of thinking – as Russia expert Stephen Cohen of Princeton has pointed out reminiscent of the 1950s; but it remains to be seen how long this can last, and even in this robust display of groupthink there is a small smattering of exceptions that break through.)
Latin America really has changed, drastically, and Correa’s view represents the vast majority of governments in the region, even if some are more diplomatic in their expression of it. This can be seen in the strong statements criticizing U.S. actions from regional organizations such as the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, which includes every country in the hemisphere except the U.S. and Canada; and UNASUR (the Union of South American Nations). (The Times article mentioned that these two organizations “issued statements expressing concern,” although that was a bit of an understatement.)
More generally, the vast majority of Latin American governments now have a foreign policy independent of Washington, which has never been true before the 21st century; and they are also much more independent of Washington in their economic policies. As recently as 2002, for example, the U.S. was able to exert a major influence on the economic policy of even the region’s largest economy, Brazil, through the International Monetary Fund.
The White House’s latest move is seen throughout the region as so outrageous and threatening that it will likely be reversed, eventually, under pressure from Latin American governments. That is what happened in April 2013, when U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry refused to recognize the results of Venezuela’s presidential election, even though there was no doubt about the outcome. At first, Washington was able to get OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza, and the right-wing government in Spain, to join in refusing to recognize the result; but then these two allies gave in under pressure, and Kerry was left completely alone, whereupon Washington recognized the results.
March 15, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | John Kerry, Latin America, Obama, United States, Venezuela |
1 Comment
Some rarely discussed truths shaping contemporary American democracy
By John Chuckman | Aletho News | March 12, 2015
Many people still think of the CIA as an agency designed to help American presidents make informed decisions about matters outside the United States. That was the basis for President Truman’s signing the legislation which created the agency, and indeed it does serve that role, generally rather inadequately, but it has become something far beyond that.
Information is certainly not something to which any reasonable person objects, but the CIA has two houses under its roof, and it is the operational side of the CIA which gives it a world-wide bad reputation. The scope of undercover operations has evolved to make the CIA into a kind of civilian army, one involving great secrecy, little accountability, and huge budgets – altogether a dangerous development indeed for any country which regards itself as a democracy and whose military is forbidden political activity. After all, the CIA’s secret operational army in practice is not curtailed by restrictions around politics, many of its tasks having been quite openly political. Yes, its charter forbids operations in the United States, but those restrictions have been ignored or bent countless times both in secret programs like Echelon (monitoring telephone communications by five English-speaking allies who then share the information obtained, a forerunner to the NSA’s recently-revealed collection of computer data) and years of mail-opening inside the United States or using substitutes to go around the rule, as was likely the case with the many Mossad agents trailing the eventual perpetrators of 9/11 inside the United States before the event.
As with all large, powerful institutions over time, the CIA constantly seeks expansion of its means and responsibilities, much like a growing child wanting ever more food and clothing and entertainment. This inherent tendency, the expansion of institutional empire, is difficult enough to control under normal circumstances, but when there are complex operations in many countries and tens of billions in spending and many levels of secrecy and secret multi-level files, the ability of any elected politicians – whose keenest attention is always directed towards re-election and acquiring enough funds to run a campaign – to exercise meaningful control and supervision becomes problematic at best. The larger and more complex the institution becomes, the truer this is.
Under Eisenhower, the CIA’s operational role first came to considerable prominence, which is hardly surprising considering Eisenhower was a former Supreme Commander in the military, the military having used many dark operations during WWII, operations still classified in some cases. In his farewell address, it is true, Eisenhower gave Americans a dark warning about the “military-industrial complex,” but as President he used CIA dark operations extensively, largely to protect American corporate interests in various parts of the world – everything from oil interests to banana monopolies in Central America. Perhaps, he viewed the approach as less destructive or dangerous or likely to tarnish America’s post-WWII reputation than “sending in the Marines,” America’s traditional gang of paid-muscle for such tasks, but, over the long term, he was wrong, and his extensive use of CIA operations would prove highly destructive and not just tarnish America’s image but totally shatter it. It set in motion a number of developments and problems which haunt America to this day.
In the 1950s, the CIA was involved in a number of operations whose success bred hubris and professional contempt for those not part of its secret cult, an attitude not unlike that of members of an elite fraternity or secret society at university. The toppling of disliked but democratic governments in Guatemala and Iran and other operations had, by about the time of President Kennedy’s coming to power in 1960, bred an arrogant and unwarranted belief in its ability to do almost anything it felt was needed. The case of Cuba became a watershed for the CIA and its relationship with Presidents of the United States, President Eisenhower and his CIA having come to believe that Castro, widely regarded by the public as a heroic figure at the time, had turned dangerous to American corporate and overseas interests and needed to be removed. Fairly elaborate preparations for doing so were put into place, and parts of the southern United States became large secret training grounds for would-be terrorists selected from the anti-Castro exile community by CIA officers in charge of a project which dwarfed Osama bin Laden’s later camp in the mountains of Afghanistan.
A just-elected President Kennedy was faced with a momentous decision: whether to permit and support the invasion of neighboring Cuba, great effort and expense having gone into the scheme. Kennedy supported it with limited reservations, reservations which became the source of the deepest resentment by the old boys at the CIA looking for someone to blame for the invasion’s embarrassing public failure. The truth is the CIA’s plans were ill-considered from the beginning, the product of those arrogant attitudes bred from “successes” such as Guatemala. Cuba was not Guatemala, it had a far larger population, fewer discontented elements to exploit, a cohort of soldiers freshly-experienced from the revolution against former dictator Batista, and Castro was widely regarded as a national hero. The Bay of Pigs invasion never had a chance of success, and the very fact that the CIA put so many resources into it and pressured the President to have it done shows how badly it had lost its way by that time.
That failure of the invasion, a highly public failure, created a serious rift between the President and the CIA. When the President, in an unprecedented act, fired three senior CIA figures, holding them responsible for the fiasco, we can only imagine the words which echoed in the halls of Langley. CIA plots against Castro nevertheless carried right on. America was an intensely hostile place on the matter of communism at that time, its press continuously beating the drums, and no President could afford politically to appear even slightly indifferent. Kennedy himself was not quite the peace-loving figure some of his later admirers would hold him to be. He was a work in progress, and he gave speeches often colored by strident martinet and jingo phrases. Secret attempts were made to assassinate Castro, and the Kennedys, at that time, undoubtedly would have been pleased had they succeeded.
Again, in some these attempts, the CIA went to great and genuinely weird lengths, including an arrangement with Mafia figures, something the public did not know until the 1975 Church Committee looking into illegality in CIA operations. Rumors and threats of another invasion, likely often fed by the CIA itself as psychological warfare against Cuba, led to the confrontation known as the Cuban Missile Crisis in late 1962. Here, more than ever, the President was ill-served by the CIA and the Pentagon. They wanted an immediate invasion of Cuba when U2 spy cameras detected what appeared to be missile installations under construction, utterly unaware that Russia already had battlefield-ready tactical nuclear weapons mounted on short-range missiles ready to repel an invasion.
The 1975 Church Senate Committee looking into earlier illegality came into being because a number of sources were suggesting the CIA had been engaged in assassination and other dark practices, matters which at that time quite upset the general public and some decent politicians. The names in rumors included Lumumba of Congo, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Diem of Vietnam, Schneider of Chile, and others, but since only part of the Church Report was released we cannot know the full extent of what had been going on. Another possible name is Dag Hammarskjöld of the UN. It is perhaps a key measure of how far things have deteriorated with the CIA that the Church Committee today appears almost naïve. Following the committee’s report, President Ford issued an Executive Order banning assassinations. This was replaced just a few years later by an Executive Order of Ronald Reagan’s, Reagan being a great fan of dark operations, having appointed one of the more dangerous men ever to hold the title of CIA Director, William Casey.
The CIA, of course, now runs a regular assassination air force which has killed thousands of innocent people apart from the intended targets, themselves individuals proved guilty of nothing under law. The CIA today thinks nothing of using mass killing to reach desired goals, the Maidan shootings of innocent people demonstrating in Kiev being an outstanding example, shootings which precipitated a coup last year in Ukraine against an elected government. And then there are the trained and armed maniacs which were set loose upon the people of Syria to do pretty much whatever they pleased.
Kennedy managed to resist demands for invasion in 1962, perhaps his one great achievement as President, and he took another path which eventually led to an agreement with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. That agreement, which included America’s pledge not to invade Cuba, made Kennedy a marked man. He was hated by the fanatical and well-armed Cuban émigré community, and he was hated by all the men who had devoted a fair part of their lives to eliminating Castro, the émigrés’ recruiters, trainers, handlers, and suppliers – members all of the CIA country club set whose commie-hatred was so intense it could make the veins in their foreheads pop. Some at the CIA were undoubtedly even further irked by backchannel communications which opened up between Kennedy and Khrushchev, and tentative efforts to open something of that nature with Castro. They weren’t supposed to know about these efforts, but they almost certainly did.
It is difficult today for people to grasp the intensity of anti-communist and anti-Castro feelings that pervaded America’s establishment in 1963, more resembling a religious hysteria than political views. One thing is absolutely clear, Kennedy’s assassination was about Cuba, and it was conceived out of a simmering conviction that Kennedy literally was not fit to be President. No important person who ever expressed a quiet opinion on the matter – including Mrs. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and some members of the Warren Commission – ever believed the fantasy story fashioned by the Warren Commission. Neither did informed observers abroad – the Russian and French governments for example later expressed their views – as well as a great many ordinary Americans.
Other facts about Kennedy undoubtedly added to the volatile reactions of the plotters, facts not known by the public until decades later, one fact in particular was his relatively long and intense affair with Mary Pinchot Meyer, a highly intelligent woman, socialite, and former wife of a senior CIA agent, Cord Meyer, who for a time ran Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Kennedy and Mary Meyer are said to have had long talks about world affairs and prospects for peace, and she also is said to have introduced Kennedy to marijuana and LSD, he, given his chronic back pain, willing to try almost anything. She kept a diary which was known to the CIA’s James Angleton because he was discovered searching for it after her mysterious, professional hit-style murder in 1964 (small calibre bullet by a gun held to the head). One can only imagine the raised eyebrows of CIA officials when they learned about drugs and Mary’s influence on Kennedy (could some of their numerous meetings possibly not have been bugged?). Double betrayal over Cuba, backchannel communications with Russia, and drugs and sex with an artistic, intellectual type – those surely would have made the men who decided the fates of leaders in much lesser places extremely uneasy about the future.
My focus is not the assassination, but I’ve gone into some length because I believe it was a defining event in relations between future Presidents and the CIA. After this, every President would work under its rather frightening shadow.
Lyndon Johnson was ready from day one to give the CIA anything it wanted. Whether Johnson was involved in the assassination as some plausibly believe, or whether he was just intimidated by those involved – after all, like all bullies, Johnson was at heart a coward as he demonstrated numerous times. He wasn’t long in launching the most vicious and pointless war since World War II with the cheap trick of a story about an attack upon American ships. The CIA got right into the fun in 1965 with its Operation Phoenix, which over some years involved tens of thousands of silent assassinations of village leaders and others by night-crawling Special Forces soldiers guided to their targets by CIA agents.
Like all the CIA’s more lunatic operations – this one just kept running until at least 1972 – chalking up a toll of murders estimated as high as 40,000 and proving a complete failure in its goal of securing America’s artificial rump-state of South Vietnam. It was madness to be involved in Vietnam, and it proved in the end infinitely more embarrassing and destructive to America’s morale and reputation than the Bay of Pigs invasion, but then more than a few people who knew and worked with Johnson have said that he was pretty much mad himself. The CIA fed Johnson the kind of things he wanted to hear, but the War in Vietnam was always characterized by poor intelligence, and when the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese launched the huge, surprise of the Tet Offensive in early 1968, Washington was hit by an earthquake, and a lot of people suddenly understood Vietnam was a lost cause. Johnson, always the coward, his party starting to split into factions over the matter, announced his resignation not long after.
Of course, the truth is that the information side of the CIA’s house has never been very good at its work. Apart from the abject failures of Vietnam, the CIA is said to have never once got the most critical assessments of the Cold War era, those of the Soviet Union’s economic and military strength, anywhere close to accurate. There were many reasons for that, but the perceived need to exaggerate your enemy’s strength to inflate the size of CIA budgets was an important one. Whether Big Intelligence ever really works in obtaining reliable information and reliable information which will be used by politicians is certainly a topic open for discussion. The most successful information-gathering intelligence service of the early Cold War, the KGB, often had its sometimes remarkable material questioned or cast aside by Stalin.
Richard Nixon’s demise in the Watergate scandal likely was served up by CIA dirty tricks. The Watergate break-in was in mid-1972, although it took more than two years before Nixon resigned. Some of the old CIA hands who worked for Nixon’s secret “plumber’s unit,” a private operations group which did jobs like breaking in to the Watergate Hotel offices of the Democrats, had a history going back to the assassination. They undoubtedly kept Langley informed of what steps they were being ordered to take. Nixon was a problem for some of the CIA’s darkest secrets: he was jealous and bitter towards the Kennedys for beating him in the 1960 election (he also knew election fraud was used), and he had an obsessive curiosity about the assassination, having made a number of attempts to ascertain just what happened for which he was rebuffed.
A possible second reason for the CIA’s wanting to dump Nixon was the deteriorated situation in Vietnam. The Paris Peace Accords were signed early in 1973, however there is evidence that Nixon and Kissinger actually put forward their proposals in the hope that they would be rejected and Congress then would allow them a free hand in seeking a clearer victory. But by that time even the CIA recognized the war in Vietnam could not be won by conventional means and that the interests of the United States were being damaged by its continuation. Despite press blurbs about peace, Nixon always desperately wanted to triumph in Vietnam, having gone so far in secret as to discuss the possibility of using nuclear weapons on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Despite various speculations, we have never learned just what Nixon’s burglars were after at the Watergate, and the reason for that may just well be the CIA’s having baited him with false information about what might be discovered there. The job very likely was deliberately sabotaged when old CIA hands do things like sloppy door-taping. The neat little trick alerted a security guard and led to the whole long Watergate Affair and Nixon’s eventual resignation, just the kind of neat outcome operations-types love to chuckle over at expense account lunches.
George H. W. Bush senior, the man for whom the Langley headquarters is named was more than a short-term appointed CIA Director. He had a long but never acknowledged background in the CIA, a fact which has come to light from a few references in obscure documents obtained by assassination researchers over decades. He almost certainly was involved with the operations against Castro before the assassination. He was likely America’s first official CIA President. One of the regular activities of the CIA abroad is to pay secret pensions to likely future leaders in select countries so that they will be both beholden and in a position to be compromised. They do this in dozens of significant countries as part of an effort to control future relations with America. So why not take a similar approach to leadership inside the United States? The first clear example was George H. W. Bush whose single term as President gave the CIA several schemes abroad dear to their hearts, including setting up Saddam Hussein for invasion after his foolish invasion of Kuwait (done following the seeming approval of the United States’ ambassador to Iraq), and the invasion of Panama in 1989. Panama’s General Noriega had apparently done the unforgivable thing of setting up “honey traps” in which American diplomats and CIA officials were photographed having sex, giving Noriega a powerful weapon against Washington’s interference. So he was set up on drug charges – which may or may not have been true, but they were not the business of American justice – other provocations were arranged like a silly stunt about an American sailor being beaten up, and Noriega’s country promptly was invaded.
Of course George Bush Junior was not CIA, lacking the fundamental requirement of a decent brain. But his presidency was effectively America’s first dual presidency, with Dick Cheney serving as senior partner despite his lesser title, and Dick Cheney was CIA-connected, having served as Secretary of Defense under George Bush’s father, overseen such operations as Desert Storm, and after George H. W.’s election defeat, serving as Chairman and CEO of Halliburton, a gigantic oil services company which operates all over the globe. Such companies – in much the same fashion as large American news organizations such as Time-Life, CBS, or The New York Times – notoriously are well connected with the CIA. Because companies like Halliburton operate in scores of countries, deal with strategic resources, travel to remote sites, and often have access to important figures, they provide perfect cover for CIA agents and other intelligence assets. The Bush-Cheney period was certainly a golden one for the CIA in terms of institutional growth and new projects. Many ugly projects now making our world a less secure place were started in this period.
The CIA now is so firmly entrenched and so immensely well financed – much of it off the books, including everything from secret budget items to peddling drugs and weapons – that it is all but impossible for a president to oppose it the way Kennedy did. Obama, who has proved himself a fairly weak character from the start, certainly has given the CIA anything it wants. The dirty business of ISIS in Syria and Iraq is one project. The coup in Ukraine is another. The pushing of NATO’s face right against Russia’s borders is still another. Several attempted coups in Venezuela are still more. And the creation of a drone air force for extrajudicial killing in half a dozen countries is yet another. They don’t resemble projects we would expect from a smiley-faced, intelligent man who sometimes wore sandals and refused to wear a flag pin on his lapel during his first election campaign.
More than one observer has speculated about Obama’s being CIA, and there are significant holes in his resume which could be accounted for by his involvement. He would have been an attractive candidate for several reasons. Obama is bright, and the CIA employs few blacks in its important jobs. He also might have been viewed as a good political prospect for the future in just the way foreign politicians are selected for secret pensions. After all, before he was elected, there were stories about people meeting this smart and (superficially) charming man and remarking that they may just have met a future president.
If Obama is not actually CIA, then he is so intimidated that he pretty much rubber stamps their projects. A young, inexperienced President must always be mindful of that other young President whose head was half blown off in the streets of Dallas. Moreover, there are some shady areas in Obama’s background around drugs and perhaps other matters which could be politically compromising. The CIA is perfectly capable of using anything of that nature for political exposure while making it look as though it came from elsewhere.
So, when people write of America’s secret government or of its government within the government, it is far more than an exaggeration. It is actually hard to imagine now any possibility of someone’s being elected President and opposing what the CIA recommends, the presidency having come to resemble in more than superficial ways the Monarchy in Britain. The Queen is kept informed of what Her government is doing, but can do nothing herself to change directions. Yes, the President still has the power on paper to oppose any scheme, and then so does the Queen simply by refusing her signature, but she likely could exercise that power just once. In her case the consequence would be an abrupt end to the Monarchy. In a President’s case, it would be either a Nixonian or Kennedyesque end.
March 12, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, ISIS, National Security Agency, United States |
3 Comments
President Obama, who is currently engaged in multiple wars on both the African and Asian continents and is hell-bent on provoking a war in Europe with Russia, is now stepping to the very brink of war in South America, against Venezuela. On Monday, Obama declared a state of national emergency to justify freezing the assets of 7 Venezuelan officials that the U.S. claims are involved in human rights violations. In order to comply with U.S. law, Obama asserted that Venezuela represents a threat the national security of the United States. The White House pretended that the scary language was just a legal technicality, and does not mean that the president actually believes Venezuela is about to do harm to the United States. However, Obama is invoking the same language and law against Venezuela that was used against Syria and Iran, leading to Syria’s near destruction by the U.S. and its allies and proxies, and to vicious sanctions and a state of near-war with Iran. Venezuela has every reason to fear that Obama’s executive order might be a prelude to military attack.
Washington has been trying to topple the socialist government in Venezuela since at least 2002, when George Bush backed an unsuccessful coup against the late President Hugo Chavez. Since then, Venezuela has conducted more elections than any other nation in the hemisphere, all of them vouched for as free and fair by international observers. Unable to prevail at the polls, the rightwing, racist opposition hopes to come to power through another coup or direct military intervention by the United States. In that context, Obama’s assertion that Venezuela is a danger to U.S. national security ranks just short of a declaration of war.
Venezuelan President Maduro has thrown a few of the most brazen coup plotters in jail, which Obama ridiculously describes as a massive violation of human rights. However, the worst human rights violators in the hemisphere are Washington’s allies. Almost six million people, most of them Black and indigenous, have been displaced from their homes by political violence in Colombia, a U.S. client state. Mexico’s is a narco-state, as violent as Colombia. And Honduras, where the U.S. backed a military coup against the democratically elected government in 2009, is a place of lawlessness and state terror.
Luckily, the United States only has a few remaining allies left in Latin America. What unifies the southern part of the hemisphere is the common experience of the U.S. boot on one’s neck. CELAC, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, which includes all of the nations of the western hemisphere except Canada and the U.S., has warned Washington to stop interfering in Venezuela’s internal affairs.
So, if Obama thinks that he can get away with waging a phony “humanitarian” interventionist war against Venezuelan President Maduro, as he did against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, he will find himself opposed by an entire continent.
March 11, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Progressive Hypocrite | Latin America, Obama, United States, Venezuela |
1 Comment
Caracas – U.S. President Barack Obama issued an executive order this Monday slapping Venezuela with new sanctions and declaring the Bolivarian nation an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security”.
The sanctions target seven individuals accused by the White House of alleged human rights violations and “public corruption”, freezing their assets and barring entry into the U.S.
The figures include Justo Jose Noguera Pietri, President of the state entity, the Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana (CVG) and Katherine Nayarith Haringhton Padron, a national level prosecutor currently taking the lead in the trials of several Venezuelan political opposition leaders, including Leopoldo Lopez.
The executive order is the latest in a series of U.S. sanctions imposed on Venezuela over the past few months. On February 3, the Obama administration expanded the list of Venezuelan officials barred from entering the U.S., which now includes the Chief Prosecutor Luis Ortega Diaz.
“Venezuelan officials past and present who violate the human rights of Venezuelan citizens and engage in acts of public corruption will not be welcome here, and we now have the tools to block their assets and their use of U.S. financial systems,” announced White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
The U.S. has failed thus far to disclose evidence that might bolster its claims of human rights violations, leading Venezuelan and other regional leaders to condemn what they regard as the arbitrary and political character of U.S. sanctions.
While regional bodies such as the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) have called for dialogue, Washington has so far refused to support negotiations or to recognise the organisation’s stance.
“We will continue to work closely with others in the region to support greater political expression in Venezuela, and to encourage the Venezuelan government to live up to its shared commitment, as articulated in the OAS Charter, the Inter American Democratic Charter, and other relevant instruments related to democracy and human rights,” reads the latest White House statement.
The order goes on to call for the release of all “political prisoners” allegedly held by the Venezuelan government, including “dozens of students”.
The Venezuelan government, for its part, maintains that all of those arrested are in the process of facing trial for criminal offences linked to violent destabilization efforts spearheaded by the opposition.
Former Caracas Metropolitan Mayor Antonio Ledezma was arrested last month on charges of conspiracy and sedition related to the February 12 thwarted “Blue Coup” attempt. A Venezuelan judge found sufficient evidence linking the opposition figure to air force officials involved in the coup as well as to rightwing terrorist leaders such as Lorent Saleh, who was extradited by Colombian authorities to face charges last year.
The other high profile Venezuelan opposition leader currently facing trial is Leopoldo López, who was indicted for his role in leading several months of violent opposition protests last year with the aim of effecting the “exit”, or ouster, of the constitutional government. Known as the “guarimbas”, these violent protests and street barricades caused the death of 43 people, the majority of whom were security personnel or Chavistas.
Ledezma and López, together with far right leader Maria Corina Machado, were active in the 2002 coup against then president Hugo Chávez, which succeeded in temporarily ousting the Venezuelan leader until he was restored by a popular uprising.
All three opposition leaders also signed a “National Transition Agreement” released on the day prior to February’s “Blue Coup” attempt, describing the government of Nicolas Maduro as in its “terminal phase” and declaring the need to “name new authorities” without mentioning elections or other constitutional mechanisms. Many political commentators interpreted the document as an open call for a coup against the president.
The Venezuelan government has charged the U.S. government with hypocrisy on the issue of human rights, and in particular the mass repression and incarceration of Afrodescendent communities in the U.S.
On February 28, President Maduro announced new measures imposing a reciprocal travel visa requirements on U.S. citizens seeking to enter Venezuela as well as mandating a reduction in U.S. embassy staff to levels that match the number of Venezuelan personnel in Washington.
Maduro also announced the creation of an “anti-terrorist list” of individuals barred from entering Venezuela, which will include former U.S. officials such as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who have reportedly “committed human rights violations.”
Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Delcy Rodriguez, has confirmed that the Bolivarian government will soon issue an official response to the order.
March 10, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Progressive Hypocrite | Latin America, Obama, U.S. sanctions, United States, US interference, Venezuela, Venezuela-U.S. Relations |
1 Comment
The original idea of the CIA was to have independent-minded experts assessing both short- and longer-term threats to U.S. national security. Mixing with operations and politics was always a danger, which is now highlighted by CIA Director Brennan’s reorganization, opposed by a group of U.S. intelligence veterans.
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: John Brennan’s Restructuring Plan for CIA
Mr. President, the CIA reorganization plan announced by Director John Brennan on Friday is a potentially deadly blow to the objective, fact-based intelligence needed to support fully informed decisions on foreign policy. We suggest turning this danger into an opportunity to create an independent entity for CIA intelligence analysis immune from the operational demands of the “war on terror.”
On Feb. 5, 2003, immediately after Colin Powell’s address to the UN, members of VIPS sent our first VIPS memorandum, urging President George W. Bush to widen the policy debate “beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.”
The “former senior officers” whom Brennan asked for input on the restructuring plan are a similar closed, blinkered circle, as is the “outstanding group of officers from across the Agency” picked by Brennan to look at the Agency’s mission and future. He did not include any of the intelligence community dissidents and alumni who fought against the disastrous politicization of intelligence before the attack on Iraq. Nor does Brennan’s plan reflect the lessons learned from that debacle.
You have continued to express confidence in Brennan despite the CIA’s mediocre record under his leadership. We urge you to weigh Brennan’s plan against the backdrop of Harry Truman’s prophetic vision for the CIA. We need to stop wasting time and energy trying to prevent the baby Truman never wanted from being thrown out with the bathwater. Let the bathwater run off, with the baby high and dry.
An independent group for intelligence analysis would be free to produce for you and your National Security Council the medium- and long-term strategic intelligence analysis that can help our country steer clear of future strategic disasters. And we offer ourselves as advisers as to how this might be accomplished.
Our concern over what we see as the likely consequences stemming from what Brennan intends, together with our many years of experience in intelligence work, have prompted this memo, which we believe can profit from some historical perspective.
—
President Harry Truman wanted an agency structure able to meet a president’s need for “the most accurate … information on what’s going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots.” In an op-ed appearing in the Washington Post exactly one month after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Truman added, “I have been disturbed by … the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment … and has become an operational and at times policy-making arm of the Government.”
Truman added that the “most important thing” was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or lead the President into unwise decisions. His warning is equally relevant now – 52 years later.
Bay of Pigs
Truman was referring to how CIA Director Allen Dulles tried to mousetrap President Kennedy into committing U.S. armed forces to finish what a rag-tag band of CIA-trained invaders of Cuba began by landing at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, a few months before you were born. Kennedy had repeatedly warned the CIA brass and covert action planners that under no circumstances would he commit U.S. forces. But they were old hands; they knew better; they thought the young President could be had.
Allen Dulles’s handwritten notes discovered after his death show how he drew Kennedy into a plan that was virtually certain to require the support of U.S. forces. Dulles wrote that Kennedy would be compelled by “the realities of the situation” to give whatever military support was necessary “rather than permit the enterprise to fail.”
Kennedy fired Dulles, a quintessential Washington Establishment figure – something one does only at one’s own peril. As young CIA officers at the time, some of us experienced first-hand the deep reservoir of hate in which many a CIA covert action operator swam. Many could not resist venting their spleen, calling Kennedy a “coward” and even “traitor.”
Analysis Also Corrupted
You are fully aware, we trust, that our analysts’ vaunted ethos of speaking unvarnished truth to power was corrupted by Director George Tenet and Deputy Director John McLaughlin, who outdid themselves in carrying out the instructions of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. The new ethos boiled down to this: If the President wants to paint Iraq as a strategic threat, it is our job to come up with the “evidence” – even if it needs to be manufactured out of whole cloth (or forged, as in “yellowcake uranium from Africa” caper).
Honest analysts were admonished not to rock the boat. A concrete example might help to show this in all its ugliness. When the only U.S. intelligence officer to interview “Curve Ball” before the war saw a draft of Powell’s Feb. 5, 2003 speech citing “first-hand descriptions” by an Iraqi defector of a fleet of mobile bioweapons laboratories, he strongly questioned the “validity of the information.” The interviewer had, from the outset, expressed deep reservations about Curveball’s reliability.
Here’s what the interviewer’s supervisor, the Deputy Chief of the CIA’s Iraqi Task Force, wrote in an email responding to his misgivings:
“Let’s keep in mind the fact that this war’s going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn’t say, and that the Powers That Be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he’s talking about. However, in the interest of Truth, we owe somebody a sentence or two of warning, if you honestly have reservations.”
This was not an isolated occurrence. Commenting on the results of a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee five-year study of pre-Iraq-war intelligence, Chairman Jay Rockefeller described it as “unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even nonexistent.” He was alluding to information (in)famously described as a “slam dunk” by then-CIA Director George Tenet who was singularly responsible for advancing the career of John Brennan.
In a departure from customary diplomatic parlance, then-Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence Carl Ford, speaking to the authors of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, had harsh words for Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin. Ford said that the evidence and analysis they gave policy makers was “not just wrong, they lied … they should have been shot.”
It is unfortunately true that – short of quitting and blowing the whistle – there is little one can do to prevent the skewing of “intelligence” when it is directed from the top – whether by the Bush-Tenet-McLaughlin consequential deceit on the threat from Iraq, or the ideological/careerist conceit of William Casey-Robert Gates in insisting up until the very end of the Soviet regime that the Soviet Communist Party would never relinquish power and that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was merely cleverer than his predecessors.
Thankfully, Not All Gave Up
There is hope to be drawn from those occasions where senior intelligence officials with integrity can step in, show courageous example, and – despite multiple indignities and pitfalls in the system – can force the truth to the surface. We hope that you have been made aware that, after the no-WMD-anywhere debacle on Iraq, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence Thomas Fingar did precisely that during 2007, supervising a watershed National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that concluded unanimously, “with high confidence,” that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon in 2003.
President Bush concedes in his memoir that this put the kibosh on his and Dick Cheney’s earlier plan to attack Iran during their last year in office. So, character (as in Fingar) counts, and people of integrity can make a difference – and even help thwart plans for war – even in the most politicized of circumstances.
Restructuring
Accordingly, the primary objective in any restructuring should be to make it easier for people of integrity, like Thomas Fingar, to create an atmosphere in which analysts feel free to tell it like it is without worry about possible harm to their careers, should they come up with a politically “incorrect” conclusion – as the one on Iran clearly was.
The problem is that the Brennan restructuring effort does just the opposite. It puts the politicization on steroids. Placing intelligence analysts and operations officers together fosters a quite different kind of atmosphere – the kind that increases the likelihood of what Truman called the “most important thing” to guard against – leading “the President into unwise decisions.”
Truman saw the general problem and went even further, saying he “would like to see the CIA restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President … and its operational duties terminated or properly used elsewhere.” We think Truman was right then; and he is right now.
Decades of experience show that Truman’s fears were well founded. Indeed, from the outset, putting analysis and covert action operations together in the same agency was the first structural fault, so to speak, when it was created in 1947.
It was occasioned primarily by insistence that WWII OSS operatives who could match the KGB in what is now called “regime change” remain in government, and then a myopic choice to place them with the analysts in the newly created CIA. As Melvin Goodman points out in his The Failure of Intelligence: the Decline and Fall of the CIA, the early “CIA leadership itself was opposed to having responsibility for covert action, believing that the clandestine function would ultimately taint the intelligence product, a prescient observation.”
During the 1980s, President Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Shultz, correctly accused CIA Director William Casey and his deputy, Robert Gates, of slanting intelligence, charging that their operational involvement “colored” the Agency’s analysis. Shultz openly charged William Casey with giving President Reagan “faulty intelligence” to bolster Casey’s own policy preferences, including the ill-conceived arms-for-hostages-swap with Iran.
Shultz added that, because he had a sense of this analysis-operations toxic mix, he harbored “grave doubts about the objectivity and reliability of some of the intelligence I was getting.” Shultz was a strong advocate of separating the analysis from operations, likening the need to that of separating investment from commercial banking.
“War on Terrorism” as Business Model
The business model chosen by Brennan is fashioned to the “War on Terrorism,” and he holds up the Counterterrorism Center (CTC) as a model to emulate. There the analysts and operations officers sit side by side charged primarily with hunting, targeting, and killing in that war.
But truth, it has been pointed out, is the first casualty of war. This can be seen right off the bat in the exaggerated way the supposed “successes” of the Center are advertised. Some of us have worked in or closely with these CIA Centers, after which ten new “Mission Centers” are patterned. And we are taken aback by the hyperbolic plaudits being given them – and especially to the CTC.
That a quintessential politicizer, and big Curve Ball promoter, like former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin is reported to have advised Brennan on the restructuring, and lauds the benefits of “putting analysts and operators together” adds to our concern.
Very much in step, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, for instance, claims that existing Centers have “proven to be a very powerful combination” and that the Counterterrorism Center is “the most successful agency component over the last decade.”
Morell remains focused on the business model of war. Just days ago he conceded that he did not think he would live to see the end of al-Qaeda: “My children’s generation and my grandchildren’s generation will still be fighting this fight,” said Morell.
Does it occur to Morell or others who have played senior intelligence roles that there ought to be a different kind of center, like what used to exist in parts of the Directorate of Intelligence, where analyst talent might be used not simply for targeting terrorists, but for figuring out what their grievances are, and whether there may be more promising ways to address them?
Do we really believe that terrorists slip out of the womb screaming “I hate America”? And is there a cost to drone-killing them as the preferred method of eliminating terrorists (together with others who may be in the wrong place at the wrong time)?
Brennan has announced that the new Centers will “bring the full range of operational, analytic, support, technical, and digital personnel and capabilities to bear on the nation’s most pressing security issues and interests.”
We need to learn more of the specifics, but the integrated Mission Centers sound very much like fertile field for politicization and centralized control under which subordinates will feel pressure to fall in line with prosecuting the war de jour and to sign on to politically correct solutions dictated from the 7th floor under guidance from your staff in the White House.
Is this the kind of CIA we need — everyone marching in step, as major parts of the Agency are transformed into a private army at your disposal, with virtually no Congressional oversight? We don’t think so.
A Watershed
With the present restructuring plan we see little promise for the kind of agenda-free, substantive intelligence that you and other senior policy makers need. But the train seems to have left the station headed toward Brennan’s restructuring plan. The sweeping reorganization scheme is of such importance that it should be the subject of hearings in the intelligence committees of House and Senate, but there is no indication that either committee intends to do so.
Let the analysts inclined toward targeting terrorists and providing other direct operational support to war sign up for these war-on-terror and like Centers. You and your successors will still need an agency devoted to unfettered intelligence analysis able to critique honestly the likely medium- and long-term consequences of the methods used to wage the “war on terror” and other wars.
We can assure you it is far better for those analysts doing this demanding substantive work NOT to be simultaneously “part of the team” implementing that policy.
It is time to revert to what Truman envisaged for the CIA. We are ready to make ourselves available to assist you and your staff in thinking through how this might be done. That it needs to be done is clear to us, and this would seem an opportune time.
In our view, we need to stop wasting time and energy trying to prevent the baby from being thrown out with the bathwater. Let the bathwater run off. Save the baby, even if that means a separate institution in which analysts of the kind that completed that NIE on Iran in 2007 can flourish. This just might help stop a new unnecessary war, as the combat support officers try to bring an end to old ones.
In sum, we are convinced that a separate entity for intelligence analysis – the kind of agency Truman envisaged for his CIA – would be an invaluable asset to you and your successors as president.
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
Fulton Armstrong, National Intelligence Officer for Latin America (ret.)
Larry Johnson, CIA analyst & State Department/counterterrorism, (ret.)
John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer
David MacMichael, USMC & National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern, Army Infantry/Intelligence officer & CIA presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Torin Nelson, former HUMINT Officer, Department of the Army
Coleen Rowley, retired FBI Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel
Peter Van Buren, former diplomat, Department of State (associate VIPS)
Kirk Wiebe, Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA (ret.)
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colonel (USA, ret.), Distinguished Visiting Professor, College of William and Mary
Ann Wright, retired U.S. Army reserve colonel and former US diplomat (resigned in March 2003 in opposition to the Iraq War)
March 10, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Progressive Hypocrite | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, United States |
Leave a comment
Etymology, or the study of where words come from, can be a fascinating topic.
Yesterday I put up a post which contained a description of Victoria Nuland as Obama’s “hit lady,” and which mentioned also that Nuland is married to Jewish neocon Robert Kagan.
It’s interesting to take a look at the word “kagan” in terms of its etymology. Is the word perhaps derived from another language? Did its use originate in another country?
The answer to that is yes on both counts. The words comes from Khazaria, a kingdom which once existed in what is today Ukraine and which underwent a mass conversion to Judaism in about the 8th or 9th century AD. Ashkenazi Jews today are descendents of the Khazars, and as I discussed in an article I wrote last year, the leader or head of state of the Khazar kingdom was not referred to as a “king”, but rather as the “kagan.”
It’s just a little something I thought might interest readers.
In the post I put up yesterday, I mentioned that Robert Kagan was one of the founders of the Project for a New American Century, a group of neocons who organized themselves in 1997 and who are probably most famous today for having composed a report entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” That document envisioned a “new Pearl Harbor” befalling the United States, and was released in September of 2000. One year later 9/11 happened.
Kagan and William Kristol were the two co-founders of PNAC. You can go here to see a list of others who have been involved with the organization. Nuland’s husband is the only “Kagan” but other names on the list are “Abrams,” “Cohen,” “Decter,” “Gaffney,” “Podhoretz,” and “Wolfowitz”–all Jewish. That’s not to say there weren’t a few Gentiles in the merry little klan. Jeb Bush and Dick Cheney are there as well.
Like Nuland, Elliot Abrams also seems to be cheer leading for war with Russia, as do Kristol, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, and Frank Gaffney. These and others collectively are building a momentum toward war with Russia, and President Obama seems for the most part to be going with the flow.
It does seem very much as if America has a ruling class of “Kagans.” And equally, it seems Obama either can’t or won’t stand up to them. But then after all, they’re “kagans” and he’s only a “president.”
Below is an interesting little piece written by Kevin MacDonald and posted last year on February 9, less than two weeks before Viktor Yanukovych, the legitimate, democratically elected president of Ukraine, was ousted from power.
Victoria Nuland’s Family Ties: The Permanent Government in Action
Intertwined Jewish power families are an important aspect of Jewish history, cementing business relationships by creating networks of close relatives who married only among themselves—e.g., the Court Jews of 17th- and 18th-century Europe (see here, pp 150-152). We see echoes of that in the contemporary world, as among the neocons.
As with the other Jewish intellectual movements I have studied, neoconservatives have a history of mutual admiration, close, mutually supportive personal, professional, and familial relationships, and focused cooperation in pursuit of common goals. For example, Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of
Commentary, is the father of John Podhoretz, a neoconservative editor and columnist. Norman Podhoretz is also the father-in-law of Elliott Abrams, the former head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (a neoconservative think tank) and the director of Near Eastern affairs at the National Security Council. Norman’s wife, Midge Decter, recently published a hagiographic biography of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose number-two and number-three deputies at the Pentagon, respectively, are Wolfowitz and Feith. Perle is a fellow at the AEI. He originally helped Wolfowitz obtain a job with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1973. In 1982, Perle, as Deputy Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, hired Feith for a position as his Special Counsel, and then as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Negotiations Policy. In 2001, Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz helped Feith obtain an appointment as Undersecretary for Policy. Feith then appointed Perle as chairman of the Defense Policy Board. This is only the tip of a very large iceberg. “
Neoconservatism as a Jewish movement” (p. 32)
Ethnic networking and ties cemented by marriage are on display in the flap over Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s phone conversation with Geoffrey Pyatt, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine. As VDARE’s Steve Sailer puts it, Nuland is a member of
a talented, energetic [Jewish] family that is part of the Permanent Government of the United States. It doesn’t really matter who wins the Presidential election: some Kagan-Nuland will be doing something somewhere in your name and on your dime.
The Kagan connection is via her husband, Robert Kagan. As noted by
Your Lying Eyes, “Robert and brother
Fred seem to have strategically implanted themselves in key policy-making positions within the Democratic and Republican party apparatus. Robert is embedded at Brookings, while Fred is ensconsed at AEI.”
So we have another Jewish neocon family tree, beginning with Donald Kagan, a Yale historian whose history of the Peloponnesia War has been used by neocons as a rationale for invasions of countries Israel doesn’t like (see Sailer). Donald Kagan was also a signatory to a 2002 letter to George W. Bush put out by Bill Kristol’s Project for the New American Century (PNAC) equating threats to Israel (Iran, Syria, Iraq) with threats to the U.S.
The next generation, Fred Kagan (American Enterprise Institute) and Robert Kagan (Brookings) are neocon stalwarts as well. (E.g., Donald, Robert and Frederick are all signatories to the neocon manifesto, Rebuilding America’s Defenses (2000), put out by PNAC.) They and their wives, are all graduates of elite universities and well entrenched in the neocon thinktank/government infrastructure. Fred’s wife Kimberly (nee Kessler) is the head of the Institute for the Study of War and holds typical neocon positions.
And although U.S. policy toward Ukraine likely stems from other issues besides the neocon hostility toward Russia (the latter due to issues such as Putin’s crackdown on the oligarchs and Russia’s support of Israel’s enemies, Iran and Syria), there be little doubt that Nuland’s energetic support of the pro-EU opposition to the Yanukovych government dovetails with the attitudes of her neocon network. Our Permanent Government at work.
March 8, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Israel, Russia, Syria, Ukraine, United States, Zionism |
3 Comments
One of the most prominent Color Revolution experts in America’s coup d’état toolkit has been hurriedly recalled from retirement for immediate deployment to Kyrgyzstan. Richard Miles, the engineer of the first Color Revolution in Serbia and the Rose Revolution in Georgia, has been appointed as charge d’affaires in Kyrgyzstan until a new ambassador is confirmed by the Senate, because the former one, Pamela Spratlen, has been reassigned as the US Ambassador to Uzbekistan. While it is not known how long Miles will remain in Kyrgyzstan, which will be the Eurasian Union’s weakest economy when it joins in May of this year, ordinary citizens there already suspect that foul play is being planned against their country and have protested his arrival. Given that Miles’ track record of regime change makes him worthy of the ‘Male Nuland’ moniker, it’s appropriate to investigate what tricks the US may be up to in Central Asia, and how it may be trying to force the Ukrainian scenario onto Russia’s southern doorstep.
The Male Nuland
Richard Miles has kept a relatively low profile throughout the years and hasn’t garnered the notoriety that his ideological protégé Nuland has, but this doesn’t mean that he’s any less dangerous for the countries he visits. In fact, since he’s the individual who spearheaded the Color Revolution tactic in the first place, he can even be referred to as a ‘proto Nuland’, owing to his ‘successes’ in Serbia and Georgia that helped make EuroMaidan possible in the first place. While he was no longer the American Ambassador to Yugoslavia when the 2000 Bulldozer Revolution overthrow Slobodan Milosevic, he certainly paved the way for its implementation during his work over the three years prior, including overseeing the NATO War on Serbia. As regards Georgia, he served as US Ambassador from 2002-2005 and repeated the Belgrade template in Tbilisi.
Afterwards, he became the Executive Director for the Open World Leadership Center for most of 2006, during which he fostered the creation of thousands of pro-American ‘leaders’ in the former Soviet Union. To Center’s own mission statement concisely describes the type of work that it does:
“Begun as a pilot program in 1999 and established as a permanent agency in late 2000, the Center conducts the first and only international exchange agency in the U.S. Legislative Branch and, as such, has enabled more than 17,000 current and future leaders from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan to meaningfully engage and interact with Members of Congress, Congressional staff, and thousands of other Americans, many of whom are the delegates’ direct professional counterparts.”
The above statement can be read as an admission that the Center’s purpose is to create pro-American proxies that can seamlessly interact with and do the bidding of their Washington patrons, thereby essentially making it an NGO front for the US intelligence community’s cultivation of Color Revolution assets. The organization doesn’t hide the fact that its purpose is to promote American interests and profit, brazenly bragging that:
“Open World offers an extraordinary “bang for the buck” in terms of efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and value. The Center boasts an overhead rate of about 7 percent, every grant contains cost-shared elements, and more than 75 percent of our appropriation is plowed back into the American economy every year. The Center might best be described as both a mini-stimulus plan as well as a true international exchange program.”
Bearing in mind Miles’ experience in running this Color Revolution recruitment front, as well as his contribution to managing two ‘successful’ regime change operations in Serbia and Georgia, he can easily be identified as one of the most dangerous people in the US deep state establishment, and the fact that he was recalled from retirement to urgently take the ‘temporary’ post in Kyrgyzstan during these tense geopolitical times must absolutely be seen as a warning about Washington’s nefarious intentions.
Uzbekistan’s Role In The US’ Central Asian Strategy
While Washington is poised to destabilize Kyrgyzstan, it’s showing strong signals that it’s ready to do the opposite in neighboring Uzbekistan, and has been reingratiating itself with Tashkent over the past couple of years in a bid to shore up what it intends to become its Lead From Behind proxy in the region.
Safeguarding The Strategist:
Before going into the specifics and forecast for this strategic partnership, it’s necessary to look at how the US’ latest ambassadorial arrangement is meant to facilitate all of this. Ambassador Pamela Spratlen’s reassignment from Kyrgyzstan to Uzbekistan must be seen as something other than a simple diplomatic shuffle. Spratlen’s biography shows that she’s one of the US’ premier strategists for Central Asia, having previously held the posts of Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Astana, Director of Central Asian Affairs, and Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Central Asia, et al. Thus, given her importance in crafting the US’ regional strategy for Central Asia, it’s not likely that her handlers would allow such a valuable asset to sit smack dab in the middle of their next targeted state, considering that their hefty investment in her may go to waste if she’s killed or kidnapped in the proceeding violence that’s being planned. Such a mistake was made with Ambassador Christopher Stevens, one of the architects of the US-supported Libya-Syria terrorist nexus, and the US is keen to avoid having Spratlen meet an untimely end in such a shameful and embarrassing manner. Rather, seeing as how she’s a strategic specialist and not a tactical one like Miles, it’s more useful to place her in a safe location where she can supervise, assess, and direct events as they develop, hence why she’s been ordered to Tashkent.
The Lead From Behind Blueprint:
Spratlen’s diplomatic experience in handling Central Asian affairs makes her possibly the best candidate that the US can send to Uzbekistan to seal the deal on a strategic partnership. First things first, it’s worth noting that relations between Washington and Tashkent have been on the mend since the 2005 Andijan Incident led to the practical destruction of bilateral ties. In the years since, the US lifted its military embargo on the country and even bequeathed it with 308 Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles and 20 additional support vehicles from Afghanistan earlier this year, with Uzbekistan only paying the cost of transporting them. On the surface this may only seem to be a symbolic gift of friendship, but in reality, there’s a lot more to it. For instance, Uzbekistan will now be dependent on US-supplied parts and expertise for upkeep, thereby implicitly deepening the military-technical cooperation between the two countries. On top of that, it’s been noted that the MRAPs are largely ineffective in combating drug smuggling and terrorism, but acquire their real importance in crowd control. This factor becomes exceptionally important when one recognizes how close the country stands to the precipice of chaos, but for the time being, it doesn’t look like the US has the intention of stirring the bubbling pot of destabilization (which could still overflow regardless of American meddling), and instead is opting to reinforce the state for its own gain.
The US vision for Central Asia thus deserves further examination in order to figure out its true nature then, since it’s known that the US could easily instigate the creation of a Black Hole of Chaos in Uzbekistan by manipulating the many levers of destabilization there at any time that it sees fit. This would certainly carry with it immense strategic value for the US in its quest to cripple Russia, but it also has one major vulnerability, and it’s that Uzbekistan could receive Russian and Chinese assistance in combating the US-directed chaos and emerge from the crisis as a stronger and more closely integrated member of Eurasian integrational structures, beginning with the SCO and possibly even ending with integration into the Eurasian Union and reintegration into the CSTO. If Russia and China are successful in assisting Uzbekistan (and they’ve been already been expecting some vague form of regional destabilization after the 2014 NATO drawdown), then the end result would be the near-complete removal of American influence in Central Asia after the carnage has ended, meaning that non-West would be secured (despite at what may be devastating costs) in the face of the Reverse Brzezinski’s ultimate failure.
Overcoming The Competition With Russia:
Understanding that such a black hole gambit can be deployed at any time, the US seems to instead have chosen to fortify Uzbekistan as their Lead From Behind partner in the interim, with the hopes that the region’s largest military and population could project increased anti-Russian influence on all four of the other former Soviet republics that it abuts. As it stands, Uzbekistan is still formally opposed to any form of Russian-led integration, as President Islam Karimov said in January that his country will never join any “alliance similar to the U.S.S.R.”, and it even withdrew from the CSTO in 2012. Be that as it may,
Russia has been making strong strides in renewing its formerly close relations with the country. Putin visited Karimov in December and spoke about the mutual benefits of Eurasian integration, and announced that both sides had begun consultations on a possible deal between Uzbekistan and the Eurasian Union. To top it off, the Russian President even declared that Moscow would write off $890 million of Uzbekistan’s Soviet-era debt (with only $25 million of it still having to be paid), in what The Diplomat analyzed as demonstrating Russia’s commitment to strengthening ties with Tashkent.
In such a situation, it’s doubtful that Uzbekistan would turn against Russia on its own prerogative and agitate against Moscow’s interests in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. But still, Uzbekistan knows that it’s a battlefield in the ‘New Cold War’, and that it can play this role to its advantage to enact even greater concessions from both Washington and Moscow. One needs to keep in mind that the US wants to transform Uzbekistan into its Lead From Behind proxy for Central Asia (seeing as how it has the potential to become the regional powerhouse and counteract Russia’s Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Tajik partners), but it can’t do this if Uzbekistan retains positive relations with Russia. Thus, it needs to make sure that Uzbekistan does not have a rapprochement with Russia that would endanger American interests (be it naturally occurring or as the result of Russian assistance in defending against an American-inspired chaotic subversion), hence why it aims to drive a militant wedge between Tashkent and Moscow in the same way as it has done between the latter and Kiev. This is precisely the reason why it wants to create a Black Hole of Chaos in Kyrgyzstan via yet another Color Revolution there, since the expected aftershocks (to be described in the follow-up article) run the high chance of being manipulated to the point where they can turn Uzbekistan and Russia into enemies, which would ‘naturally’ make Tashkent the US’ Lead From Behind proxy. Should this plan fail, then the US can always follow up with ‘Plan B’ and unleash uncontrollable chaos inside the country (as was described earlier).
The Central Asian Front
Strategic Theory:
The US’ primary goal in creating chaos in Central Asia is to split Russia’s focus in dealing with the Ukrainian Crisis and create a situation where its decision makers are unable to adequately protect the country’s entire periphery. This is envisioned as leading to the penetration of chaotic dynamics directly into the Russian Federation itself (be it from the west or the south), which could contribute to the realization of the ‘Eurasian Balkans’ end game of dividing the country into ethnic and regional fiefdoms and indefinitely prolonging the US’ unipolar moment. In order to get to such a grand finale, a series of steps must be taken in the countries around Russia to provoke such a scenario.
The unravelling of the Ukrainian state represents the theory’s application in Eastern Europe, the threat of a continuation war in Nagorno-Karabakh fulfills the Caucasus component of this idea, and the looming Kyrgyz catastrophe wraps up the Central Asian front for the US’ pan-Eurasian campaign against 
Russia. Each of these simmering conflicts has the potential to (re)explode at any time, and if they occur in near-simultaneity, then Russia will be hard-pressed to deal with them all, and may predictably fumble in its approach and create even larger openings for more chaos to rip through its borders.
Even if these aforementioned conflicts don’t break out concurrently, the fact that three massive vacuums of destabilization are sitting on the Russia’s doorsteps means that the threat always remains that one, two, or all of them can heat up sometime in the future. This accordingly leaves Russian decision makers continually on edge and siphons off strategic resources into crafting contingency measures against these probable scenarios that could be of more productive use elsewhere, such as in preparing foreign policy initiatives that could for once place the West on the strategic defensive (for example, protecting Macedonia and promoting the ‘New South Stream’).
The 21st-Century Reagan Doctrine:
All of the abovementioned strategic imperatives aren’t the realm of speculation, however, since then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton firmly declared in December 2012 that it will do whatever it can to sabotage Russian-led integration processes in the former Soviet sphere. Referring to the Eurasian Union, she said:
“There is a move to re-Sovietise the region, It’s not going to be called that. It’s going to be called a customs union, it will be called Eurasian Union and all of that, but let’s make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.”
This is none other than a 21st-century application of the Reagan Doctrine, whereby the US will now seek to aggressively roll back Russian influence in the Near Abroad instead of Soviet influence across the world. Seen through this context, the US’ integrated strategy in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia makes more sense. Ukraine would have been the second-largest economy in the Eurasian Union and could have provided a valuable contribution to its overall strength, should the EuroMaidan Color Revolution not have derailed any realistic hopes for it joining in the near future. In the Caucasus, Eurasian Union-member Armenia is geographically cut off from the rest of its partners, being separated by EU-aspiring Georgia and hostile Azerbaijan. This lays the pretext for a coming EU-Eurasian Union crisis in the Caucasus, which could massively destabilize Russia regardless if a continuation war occurs in Nagorno-Karabakh or not.
Completing the encirclement, an outbreak of violence in Kyrgyzstan as a result of yet another Color Revolution there could lead to the formation of a terrorist hotspot inside the Eurasian Union’s newest member, as well as creating an almost irresistible temptation for Russia and the CSTO to fall for a disastrous Reverse Brzezinski intervention. In all three theaters, American foreign policy and regional meddling are the engines for destabilization, while Russia and the Eurasian Union are the ultimate targets, just as Hillary threatened they would be nearly three years ago. In the time since, Ukraine has fallen to Western domination and is rapidly being integrated into Shadow NATO, Nuland is conspiring to reignite the Nagorno-Karabakh war, and now the ‘Male Nuland’ is ready to wreak havoc in Kyrgyzstan, showing that the 21st-century Reagan Doctrine is in full swing.
To be continued…
March 6, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Progressive Hypocrite | Central Asia, Russia, Ukraine, United States |
Leave a comment
In recent weeks the Ebola epidemic in West Africa has slowed from a peak of more than 1,000 new cases per week to 99 confirmed cases during the week of February 22, according to the World Health Organization. For two countries who have taken diametrically opposed approaches to combating the disease, the stark difference in the results achieved over the last five months has become evident.
The United States, which sent about 2,800 military troops to the region in October, has announced an end to its relief mission. Most soldiers have already returned. Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby declared the mission a “success.” The criteria for this determination is unclear, as the troops did not treat a single patient, much less save a single life.
President Barack Obama proclaimed the American response to the crisis “an example of American leadership.” In the case of Ebola, as is the case “whenever and wherever a disaster or disease strikes,” according to Obama, “the world looks to us to lead.” The President claimed that the troops contributed not only by their own efforts, but by serving as a “force multiplier” that increased the ability of others to contribute. Apparently the U.S. forces also have the effect of divine inspiration.
This is an example of “American values,” Obama declares, which “matter to the world.” The “American leadership” is one more example of “what makes us exceptional,” according to Obama, as is the case “whether it’s recession, or war, or terrorism.”
Anything that Americans do is exemplary of these “values,” which by virtue of American supremacy are superior to those of people from any other nation.
When you look behind the President and the Pentagon’s rhetoric, it becomes more difficult to find concrete examples of success in the U.S. military mission to Africa. From the beginning, the capacity of American troops to make a difference in containing and eliminating a medical disease was questionable, to say the least.
In October, the Daily Beast reported that soldiers would receive only four hours of training in preparation for their deployment to Africa. That is half of a regular work day for people with no medical background. When they arrived, they did not exactly hit the ground running. “The first 500 soldiers to arrive have been holing up in Liberian hotels and government facilities while the military builds longer-term infrastructure on the ground,” wrote Tim Mak.
The DoD declared on its Web site that “the Defense Department made critical contributions to the fight against the Ebola virus disease outbreak in West Africa. Chief among these were the deployment of men and women in uniform to Monrovia, Liberia, as part of Operation United Assistance.” So, the chief contribution of the DoD was sending people in military uniforms to the site of the outbreak.
The DoD lists among its accomplishments training 1,539 health care workers & support staff (presumably non-technical and cursory); creating 10 Ebola treatment units (which you could count on your fingers); and construction of a 25-bed medical unit (for a country that has had 10,000 cases of Ebola).
USAID declares that “the United States has done more than any other country to help West Africa respond to the Ebola crisis.” Like the DoD, they are short on quantitative measurements for their assertions and long on abstractions. In vague business-speak, USAID says they “worked with UN and NGO partners,” “partnered with the U.S. military,” and “expanded the pipeline of medical equipment and critical supplies to the region.”
While the USAID personnel have clearly helped facilitate the delivery of equipment and supplies. this is far from proof that the U.S. has done more than any other country. By the end of April, all but 100 U.S. troops will have left West Africa, to continue what Obama called the “civilian response.” The transition to the civilian response seems as vague, and on a much smaller scale than the military response.
The U.S. response did involve many people and several hundred millions of dollars, which is, indeed, more than most countries contributed. But an examination of the facts shows that the U.S. played mostly a support role, involved in collaboration with other actors in the tangential aspects of the crisis. U.S. government employees were not directly involved in treating any patients. Their role was rather to help other health workers and officials on the front lines who actually did. To say this is an example of American leadership and exceptionalism seems like a vast embellishment.
The other country who has taken a very public role in the Ebola crisis is Cuba. Unlike the U.S., Cuba sent nearly 500 professional healthcare workers – doctors and nurses – to treat African patients who had contracted Ebola. These included doctors from the Henry Reeve Brigade, which has served over the last decade in response to the most high-profile disasters in the world, including in Haiti and Pakistan. In Haiti, the group was instrumental in detecting and treating cholera, which had been introduced by UN peace keepers. The disease sickened and killed thousands of Haitians.
Before being deployed to West Africa, all the Cuban doctors and nurses completed an “intense training” of a minimum of two weeks, where they “prepared in the form of treating patients without exposing themselves to the deadly virus,” according to CNN.
After Cuba announced its plan to mobilize what Cubans call the “army of white robes,” WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said that “human resources are clearly our most important need.”
“Money and materials are important, but those two things alone cannot stop Ebola virus transmission,” she said. “We need most especially compassionate doctors and nurses” to work under “very demanding conditions.”
Like their American counterparts, Cuban authorities also recently proclaimed success in fighting Ebola. They used a clear definition of what they meant.
“We have managed to save the lives of 260 people who were in a very very bad state, and through our treatment, they were cured and have gotten on with their lives,” said Jorge Delgado, head of the medical brigade, at a conference in Geneva on Foreign Medical Teams involved in fighting the Ebola crisis.
The work of the Henry Reeve Brigade was recognized by Norwegian Trade Unions who nominated the group for the Nobel Peace Prize “for saving lives and helping millions of suffering people around the world.”
The European Commission for humanitarian aid and crisis management last week also “recognized the role Cuba has played in fighting the Ebola epidemic.”
For more than 50 years, Cuba has carried out medical missions across the globe – beginning in Algeria after the revolution in 1961 and taking place in poor countries desperately needing medical care throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America. They have provided 1.2 billion consultations, 2.2 million births, 5 million operations and immunizations for 12 million children and pregnant women, according to Granma.
“In their direct fight against death, the human quality of the members of the Henry Reeve brigade is strengthened, and for those in need around the world, they represent welcome assistance,” writes Nuria Barbosa León.
The mission of the DoD is one of military involvement worldwide. As Nick Turse reports in TomDispatch, U.S. military activity on the African continent is growing at an astounding rate. The military “averages about one and a half missions a day. This represents a 217% increase in operations, programs, and exercises since the command was established in 2008,” Turse writes. He says the DoD is calling “Africa the battlefield of tomorrow, today.”
Turse writes that the U.S. military is quietly replicating its failed counterinsurgency strategy in Africa, under the guise of humanitarian activities. “If history is any guide, humanitarian efforts by AFRICOM (U.S. Africa Command) and Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa will grow larger and ever more expensive, until they join the long list of projects that have become ‘monuments of U.S. failure’ around the world,” he writes.
There are some enlightening pieces of information listed by the DoD as part of the “transition to Operation Onward Liberty.” The DoD “will build partnership capacity with the Armed Forces of Liberia” and will “continue military to military engagement in ways that support Liberia’s growth toward enduring peace and security.”
It is unclear what role the U.S. military will help their Liberian counterparts play, unless peace and security is considered from the perspective of multinational corporations who have their eyes on large oil reserves, rather than the perspective of the local population.
In Liberia, as in most of Africa, Washington’s IMF and World Bank-imposed neoliberal policies have further savaged a continent devastated by 300 years of European colonialism. Any U.S. military involvement in Liberia and elsewhere is likely to reflect the economic goals of the U.S. government, which primarily consist of continuing the implementation of the Washington consensus.
The U.S. military, unsurprisingly, seems to be using the Ebola crisis as a pretext to expand its reach inside Africa, consistent with the pattern of the last seven years that Turse describes. The deployment of several thousand troops to West Africa can be understood as a P.R. stunt that is the public face of counterinsurgency.
U.S. troops are used as props. The idea is to associate them with humanitarianism, rather than death and destruction. But a true humanitarian mission would be conducted by civilian agencies and professionals who are trained and experienced specifically in medicine, construction and administration, not by soldiers trained to kill and pacify war zones.
Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, warned last fall about the dangers of conceiving of a “war on terror template” in response to a disease such as Ebola.
“Countering Ebola will require a whole new set of protections and priorities, which should emerge from the medical and public health communities. The now sadly underfunded National Institutes of Health and other such organizations have been looking at possible pandemic situations for years,” Greenberg writes. “It is imperative that our officials heed the lessons of their research as they have failed to do many times over with their counterparts in public policy in the war on terror years.”
The approaches of the United States and Cuban governments to the Ebola epidemic are a study in contrasts. The goals that led to these policy choices are clear. And after nearly six months on the ground, the difference between a military and a technical assistance mission can easily be evaluated. The results speak for themselves.
March 2, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | Africa, Cuba, Obama, United States |
Leave a comment
Aletho News 