Iran, the NIE, Bush, Cheney and whoo-ha.

by Sara

Hopefully everyone is trying to keep their timelines straight on this one, as I suspect the powers behind the throne have just collapsed any war plans that might have existed.  KO tonight had his opportunity to use the term "Liar" in about ten different versions on his Special Comment segment, and there are, I suspect, many more pieces of this are yet to roll out.  What hasn't been emphasized enough yet, is that when the narrative about WMD fell apart on Iraq -- Bush turned to the rhetoric of "Programs to develop WMD's" as opposed to real WMD's -- and in this instance it seems he pulled the same rhetorical trick -- Iran was not really about actually developing a Nuclear Bomb program -- instead it was about getting the knowledge of how to perhaps develop a nuclear bomb program.  Hopefully someone will tell Bush that most of the necessary knowledge about this has been in Physics textbooks since at least about 1946 or 47 -- and once you master that, then the rest of it is in the peer reviewed journals -- American, British, French, Russian, Chinese, and others over the years.  Progressive Magazine did, after all, publish a rather short article on "how to do it" from open sources back in the late 1970's -- and the Supreme Court said since it was all open source, no problem.  I have a fascinating history I've been reading in recent months on the history of India's Nuclear Project -- something with origins in a study committee Nehru set up in 1946, a year before India became Independent.  By 73, and without any great push, they had a device that would explode.  In the meantime, quite independent of much outside assistance, they had a whole nuclear industry.  All this is illustrative of the bias that "knowledge" is something exclusively American, or Western, and it reminds me of the estimates offered to Truman back in the mid-1940's that the Soviets were so backward, they could not get a Nuclear Weapon before perhaps the mid 50's at the earliest.  Well -- 1949 was a little early given those estimates.  You would think that by this time the notion that science and technology knowledge is exclusively American would have worn off a bit.  Anyhow -- Bush seems to be pushing that idea again as a last ditch cover up. 

The process of outing this NIE is probably going to be one of the most fascinating bits of Bush History.  Eventually we will get the back story, but in the meantime we live in interesting times.  Clearly the various Intelligence Services had some of this information for at least a year, though I would imagine much had to survive confirmation efforts.  A few weeks ago I finished reading "Curveball" by Bob Drogin -- which I recommend highly, precisely because the raw detail is so illuminating.  Drogin sub-titles his book as "Spies, Lies, and the Con Man who Started a War."  In fact, any reasonable validation of Curveball's motivation would have revealed the problems with his Iraq intelligence.  But Curveball did provide the basis for a war against Iraq, precisely because no validation took place, and no efforts to develop corroboration took place.  And most of his evidence was worthless in the end -- no bio moble trailers at all. 

But now we have the odd story that Cheney went to the situation room a couple of weeks ago, and was briefed on the final version of the NIE, and then, in the week between that briefing, and when Bush says he understood the intelligence, they apparently never spoke or consulted.  In the meantime, we have more attacks on "knowledge" as opposed to actual weapons or existant industry that can produce them.  Cheney skipped the Xmas party at the WH with the press and many others, as he is apparently out shooting birds in South Dakota. 

I suspect alienation of affection. 

But others are out of town too while Bush has to try to find simple words to deal with his problem -- Bob Gates is in Iraq and Afghanistan, and my guess is that Gates probably forced the issue on this.  DoD just doesn't want another war right now, and this is how things are done, particularly when a former DCI is heading DoD.   

In one sense this is about Republicans trying to prove they can control the child and do national security.  They could pull it off.  What I want to know is whether the Democrats have an intelligent response to all this.  So far, I don't really hear it. 

 

Comments

[semiot]

I did a paper in grad school about the Progressive article on The Bomb. Glad to see the incident recalled. If I recall correctly, the government argued that the the 1947 National Security Act - which BTW established the CIA - established the principle that certain information was "classified from birth" regardless of how it was obtained or derived. I almost hesitate to metion this, least David Addington or one of his minions be reading this blog.

[Neil]

What I want to know is whether the Democrats have an intelligent response to all this. So far, I don't really hear it.

Would it look something like this?

1. The Democrats can make hay about how irresponsible it is for Bush to perpetuate talk about WWIII when he is in possession of intelligence that the Iranians halted uranium enrichment.

2. They can repudiate the influential branch of the Republican party that's bent on using war as a politcal tool to remake the middle east, REPEATEDLY.

3.They can formulate and set forth a course of firm action for dealing with the threats possed by the Iranian government and other rogue states.

4.They can provide detail on the nature, size and the duration of future american military in Iraq.

5. They can affirm that progress on these national security issues will be made concurrently with progress at home on domestic prioritites when the american people put a democratic president in the White House. A president for all of the American people and not just democrats.

[J. Thomason]

This episode, as so many others with this administration, relates to a transactional model which conflates "puffery" with truth a practice so frequently advanced in closing a deal by those trained in speculative economics. These practicioners always walk the fine line between a reasonable financial success and fraud.

It is not beyond the scope of historical possibility that the public or multi-cultural appreciateion of a technoloty is lost. But advancing this hope is not a particularly illumined approach. I was taught the basic principles of obtaining critical mass in high school. This said the inference suggesting the speciousness and patent absurdity of attacking Iran on the basis its possession of knowledge is spot-on.

This is all tied into the advancement of the new military epistemology by Rumsfield, an epistemoloby which is nothing more than a mere fig leaf for illegal totalitarian brutality. And the same could be said for the situational "Christianity" the administration practices. The rational humane question is why the administation is not held to a "strict liability" standard for the collateral loss of human life in Iraq. Still the most disconcerting dimension of this picture is the visceral glee the actors seem to realize in the limitless artfulness displayed in finding ways to satisfy the needs of their more liminal selves.

[Alyx]

...all I can say is this admin is so corrupt and disgusting that no words can be placed around this. I want him and his whole circus to be gone! And let this never ever happen again to the what was once the greatest nation on earth.

[Barbara Wickwire]

Semiot:
I second your call for Democrats to take real action as you suggest:

"2. They can repudiate the influential branch of the Republican party
that's bent on using war as a politcal tool to remake the middle
east, REPEATEDLY."

Why haven't they already done this?

On this one, I would suggest that they declare a "Time-Out" to
reformulate the policy in light of the new NIE.

"3. They can formulate and set forth a course of firm action for
dealing with the threats possed by the Iranian government and
other rogue states."

[phred]

Sara -- What is your take on the CIA tape revelation? Bit of a double whammy with the NIE this week, eh? Do you see major behind the scenes shifts occurring? One wonders how much latitude Bush and Cheney still have to continue their abuses of power. Of course, this may be wishful thinking on my part... And I do find the health problems and hunting intriguing. Do you think Cheney is persona non grata or just taking a break following the his recent hart problems?

[Teaeopy]

A certain amount of glee among Democrats is understandable, but hopefully it will be short-lived. There is a Bush administration determination, shared by many in Congress, to show that nothing has changed. There is a displeased administration in Israel. The main thing to be pleased about, I find, is that this time a purported casus belli is getting discredited before an offensive can be commenced. Perhaps the enlightenment of the US voting public and international watchers by the NIE conclusions will inhibit the Bush administration from doing anything else reckless. If all who oppose unnecessary war and even the cry for it get steamrolled, at least no serious reader of history will miss the motives for what will have been done.

[Sara]

Frankly, I am still mulling over the CIA Torture Tapes...don't know what to make of what Pat Lange reports, namely that some CIA types were ready to go public (and chance Jail) unless the NIE was made public -- and the leak to the NYTimes regarding the destruction of the Tapes -- Something they clearly would have given the WH a heads up on before they went to Press. It is, I think, all part of a whole -- and we still are getting drip drip information, such as Harriet Miers having known about the planned destruction of the tapes, and having opposed it, and yet Bush through his little Dana, says he cannot recollect anything about it. (My gut tells me that Bush and Cheney got out a couple of beers, watched the torture tapes, and had an orgasm.) But that is just my cynical gut, and my gut is quite biased.

We really don't have all the dot's yet to make connections. Some are suggesting we factor in the movement of the Nuclear Armed Cruise missles from North Dakota to Barksdale last August in this saga, which was apparently after the outline of the new NIE was in Bush and Cheney's hands. I have doubts about the eventual explanation, simply because I have known people who were in service and had custody of such, and they don't trust what has been said. It doesn't comport with what they understood as security proceedures.

So many are asking, "What is wrong with Congress?" I think I understand the source of the problem. For years I was represented in Congress by Don Fraser, who fairly early on took on the Vietnam War. After he left Congress, he said the worst thing he ever did was take an intelligence briefing, because once you sign the papers agreeing not to disclose, you are in a box. Whole areas of stuff, even though it is in the press, becomes off limits for you. I suspect that most well known members of Congress and the Senate are in this situation. Today we've seen Jane Harman and Jay Rockefeller revealed in this position -- they were given info on the tapes, but not enough to reach a conclusion, but they can't talk about it because of the agreements they have signed. I suspect a good deal of congress is so compromised. It is a Catch 22 situation, -- you can't act effective as to public policy if you don't know the secret, but getting access to the secret involves giving up freedom of honest advocacy. I suspect the Bushies have been quite strategic in using access to secrets as a means of silencing critics, particularly among Democratic Congress Critters. Harman and Rockefeller are both victims of this process I think.

One way or another, some folk have decided to do a big turd drop on the Bush-Cheney people, and I don't think it is really clear yet who has done what, or why. One wonders why we have heard little from Jim Baker.

[phred]

Sara, thanks for your insight. I think it is absolutely crucial that the next Congress (since this Congress appears incapable of addressing these issues) really needs to begin a series of hearings in preparation to revise legislation regarding the handling of classified information. The Constitution expressly requires government officials to reveal any criminal conduct that comes to their attention, yet over the years we have created a system that leaves officials nowhere to go if such information is also classified.

I don't know whether this is something that should be bundled in with FISA or whether a separate court needs to be created, but there ought to be a court where any government official (executive, legislative, judicial) that comes across classified information that indicates criminal behavior can ask a court (whose members have appropriate clearances) to review the conduct in question. Without such an avenue for review, I don't see how we can ever get our officials out of the box they are currently in. Further, I think this would also be an asset to mid-level civil servants to lodge complaints, where now their only recourse is to assume whistleblower status and go to the press. Given the failings of our press, we really need an alternative for these folks that doesn't jeopardize their livelihoods.

[Sara]

Phred, do you remember Senator Patrick Moynihan? I think he conducted brilliant hearings about CIA and Government Secrecy and Classification back in the early 1990's and in fact, those hearings might be the place to start. At the time, the Senator was about discovering why CIA had not predicted the collapse of the East Block and the Soviet Union, in fact none of the intelligence reporting suggested this as a possibility -- but at the same time much non-Governmental Scholarship had indeed made such predictions, not the exact form, but the coming basic crisis. Ole Pat's interest was not in small or individual failures -- but the kind of political group think that had dominated CIA's history.

Remember, before he was a Senator or the odd Democrat in Nixon's Basement, Pat was a Sociologist, and he attacked the issue within the framework of his Academic Discipline. He was devoted to the work of a German Sociologist, Georg Simmel, writing in the late 19th and early 20th century, regarding the role of the "secret" in Bureaucracy. Simmel, in a series of quite readable essays, essentially argues that the ability to make something secret, and to impose penalties for failure to maintain any secret, is the fundamental means by which individuals exercise power in virtually any organization -- but in Simmel's case, his material was drawn from the German-Prussian Government and its agencies of the late 19th and early 20th century. Pat Moynihan loved Simmel, and his writings and hearings all reflect his understanding that Simmel had found the nut of the case.

Moynihan eventually came to advocate the abolition of the CIA as we know it. He set his staff loose in CIA archived papers, concluding that about 95% of what they dealt with was also available in open sources and was in fact not secret -- but was classified anyhow, largely in the interests of narrowing the circle of those who could argue a position with authority -- and thus who could exercise power effectively.

In the end, I think it is understanding of the Power -- Secrecy relationship, in considerable detail, is how we get to a solution. The public has to understand this -- they have to see all the classification of the Bush Era in this context (it is about power, stupid). Candidates have to be asked about their approach to secrecy and overclassification, it just has to become a big issue. Only then will legislators feel free to move against those, who under false premises and in the interest of protecting a patch of power, get serious and figure it out. I am not sure about a court -- I think just vastly reducing the ability to classify might do the trick.

[phred]

Sara -- I wholeheartedly concur with the need to dramatically reduce the amount of classified information (and have harped a bit on this point in the past). So I do think a two pronged solution to the classification problem is required: first to severely curtail the amount of information that can be classified, but then second, for that which remains, a better framework to address cases where potentially criminal behavior is shielded by classification.

And I absolutely agree that secrecy is used to wield power. I think this is why the founders established an open government accountable to the public, so that they could provide a check on the powerful few who conduct the affairs of state on our behalf.

I do remember Pat Moynihan, but not the specific hearings you mention. What happened to his effort to disband the CIA? Did it just fizzle out over time or was the idea more actively quashed? Do you know if anyone has written a book on the subject?

[Sara]

Moynihan actually wrote a book about it, I think about 1993. I remember thinking he should have taken another year to research and prepare it, needed more heft, but he raised the question at just the proper time -- when the "Main Enemy" had disappeared, and CIA didn't know what the hell its mission was.

Clinton's appointment of Woolsey was the first step in stopping reform, largely because Woolsey was a techno-freak, and he wanted to get up the next generation of spy birds. They were in many cases an 80's solution that didn't take account of digital, and thus the whole program was not well though through. Gates under GHWBush had pushed this, but he had also drastically pruned the staff of CIA -- particularly those focused on the Soviet Union and E. Europe. Clinton provided little core leadership sketching out a reform direction -- and then the Ames case came down, and shifted attention away from the need for a restatement of mission and staffing as appropriate.

Sources -- Steve Simon and Daniel Benjamin have much to say about how thin on the ground CIA was regarding the Islamic and Arab World during Clinton's years, and the inability of CIA to provide consistent leadership to improve. My former Congressman, Martin Sabo sat on House Intelligence in the late 80's and early 90's, and he fought like hell to keep CIA from getting into Business, Financial and Industrial espionage on behalf of private industry. That was apparently where GHWBush wanted to go after the Soviets melted. I suspect Moynihan would have tried to lead a reform effort in the Senate had he received support from Clinton (Clinton could have at least asked him who would be a good DCI in 93, which he apparently didn't.) But had Moynihan led something, the matter of what is "secret" and how classification works would have been at the core of it.

[phred]

Thanks Sara. I think this is the book you are referring to, Secrecy: The American Experience. It appears to have a new 1999 (paperback edition). And thanks also for the perspective on those who followed Moynihan. Another item to add to my list of lost opportunities... Sigh.

[Sara]

Yep, that's the book. Damn people who put out second editions, which are usually revised. Doubles your investment in a core idea.

For folk who want some deep reads in CIA History -- two current books. This year's selection for the National Book Award, Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner, (Doubleday, 2007) (CIA reporter for the NYTimes) and John Prados's "Safe For Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA" (Ivan Dee, 2006.) -- I actually recommend anything by Prados, he has about 13 books on CIA in print, works through the National Security Archive (good website to mark -- it is private), in particular I strongly recommend Prados's "Hoodwinked" which is a detailed and multi-national effort on the Bush Case to manufacture the war on Iraq. It is interesting that both of these books -- much like Moynihan, more or less recommend either massive downsizing or elimination of the CIA. Some of the missions are still plenty valid, but other than elimination and reconstruction they see no possibility of real reform.

I think the criticism is valid. Family friend who worked for CIA for three decades told me in the late 60's about the failure to either train officers in Arabic, or recruit -- My friend was the son of Presbyterian Missionaries in China pre 1949, and he, fluent in Chinese, did Chinese translation and analysis. CIA lived on people like him for decades, but never figured out how to train their replacements. Of course he has long since retired now.

It is all about how to know about the world -- and bureaucracy is not the way to accomplish that, particularly if the requirement for leadership is not fluency in at least three languages.

[Sara]

Yep, that's the book. Damn people who put out second editions, which are usually revised. Doubles your investment in a core idea.

For folk who want some deep reads in CIA History -- two current books. This year's selection for the National Book Award, Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner, (Doubleday, 2007) (CIA reporter for the NYTimes) and John Prados's "Safe For Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA" (Ivan Dee, 2006.) -- I actually recommend anything by Prados, he has about 13 books on CIA in print, works through the National Security Archive (good website to mark -- it is private), in particular I strongly recommend Prados's "Hoodwinked" which is a detailed and multi-national effort on the Bush Case to manufacture the war on Iraq. It is interesting that both of these books -- much like Moynihan, more or less recommend either massive downsizing or elimination of the CIA. Some of the missions are still plenty valid, but other than elimination and reconstruction they see no possibility of real reform.

I think the criticism is valid. Family friend who worked for CIA for three decades told me in the late 60's about the failure to either train officers in Arabic, or recruit -- My friend was the son of Presbyterian Missionaries in China pre 1949, and he, fluent in Chinese, did Chinese translation and analysis. CIA lived on people like him for decades, but never figured out how to train their replacements. Of course he has long since retired now.

It is all about how to know about the world -- and bureaucracy is not the way to accomplish that, particularly if the requirement for leadership is not fluency in at least three languages.

[phred]

Thanks for the additional book recommendations Sara. The world indeed would be a better place if well trained competent people filled leadership positions (both elected and appointed) rather than a passel of ideological political hacks. Thanks again.