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August
1, 2003
August
1, 2003
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August
2, 2003
Their
Master's Voice
Blair
as Bush's Creature
By URI AVNERY
There's nobody like the British. The things they
get excited about!
A terrible thing has happened. Their
Prime Minister lied to them! The whole country is in an uproar.
And--how awful!--the intelligence services
have trimmed their findings to suit their political boss. Astounding!
In Israel, the United States and most
other places around the world, this would hardly rate a paragraph
on an inside page. The Prime Minister lied? So what else is new?
On the contrary, if the Prime Minister
had been caught telling the truth, now that would have been a
sensation. What, he spoke the truth? The Prime Minister? What's
going on? What is he up to?
And the intelligence services? In children's
tales, spies risk their lives to uncover secrets and save their
country.
How wonderful! And what a pity that it
has so little to do with reality.
The intelligence services do indeed look
for facts, but mostly for the facts that suit their political
bosses. They submit reports to governments, but woe betide the
service chief whose report does not suit their agenda. In short,
there is hardly an  intelligence report that is not trimmed
to suit the powers that be, that does not twist the facts or
is not an outright lie.
That explains the successive failures
of the intelligence agencies in almost all countries and in almost
all emergencies.
A few notorious examples should suffice:
A German communist named Victor Sorge,
who was spying in Japan, provided Soviet intelligence in 1941
with a detailed report on the imminent German attack on the Soviet
Union, with the exact time to the minute. Stalin refused to accept
this report and threatened to send to Siberia any intelligence
officer reporting such nonsense. As a result, hundreds of thousands
of Red Army soldiers were killed or captured when the German
attack ("Operation Barbarossa') materialized exactly on
time. This was so incredible, that a modern Russian historian
has invented an original explanation: Stalin was just about to
attack Hitler when he was forestalled at the last moment.
Or the case of the attack on Pearl Harbor,
December 1941. American intelligence had many indications that
the Japanese were intending to destroy the US Pacific Fleet.
But when the attack actually came, the American navy was totally
unprepared. That was so strange, that another conspiracy theory
gained credibility: President Roosevelt practically invited the
Japanese attack, so as to be able to drag his unwilling country
into the war.
Before the September 11 attack on the
Twin Towers, there were several warnings, but all of them got
stuck in the intelligence pipelines. This has lent credibility
to another conspiracy theory: that it was all organized by the
Mossad, who had even warned the Jews working in the Towers no
to report to work on that particular day.
The failures of Israeli intelligence
make an impressive list. On the eve of the establishment of the
state, the intelligence services (or their forerunners) did not
foresee the attack of the Arab armies that almost destroyed the
new state in its infancy. In May 1967, the intelligence services
were flabbergasted when Gamal Abd-al-Nasser sent an army into
Sinai (and started the chain of events that led to the June 1967
war). The Egyptian revolution of 1952 caught Israeli intelligence
unawares, as did the Iraqi revolution of 1958, as did the Khomeini
revolution in Iran, in spite of the fact that the Israeli intelligence
services practically had the run of the country in the Shah's
Iran.
The most notorious example was, of course,
the eve of the October 1973 war. Israeli army intelligence knew
everything: the Egyptian war plan and the assembly positions
of all Egyptian units. It saw them taking up these positions.
It overheard dozens of messages that should have left no doubt
whatsoever that the attack was imminent. A day before the war,
a highly placed Egyptian who was spying for Israel confirmed
the reports about the coming attack. And yet, the Israeli army
was taken by surprise when the Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal
without effective opposition.
The official investigation into this
intelligence failure gave birth to the Hebrew expression "conceptsia"--meaning
that army intelligence ignored all the obvious facts because
it was trapped in its own "concept" that the Egyptians
were quite unable to attack.
This is a natural phenomenon. According
to "Gestalt" psychology, a person tends to absorb information
in line with the existing pattern in his mind and tends to ignore
information that contradicts it.
Like other people, intelligence operatives
have preconceived ideas and prejudices. Bits of information that
do not fit in just do not pass through the pipelines. They are
denied and disappear.
But there is another, much simpler explanation.
Every intelligence chief has a political boss--a President, Prime
Minister, Secretary of Defense, Home Secretary. His career depends
on the boss, and so do the chances of advancement of his underlings.
When the boss appoints the service chiefs, he chooses people
who are close to his political agenda. In time, the whole intelligence
service becomes an apparatus for supplying the boss with the
information he wants to hear and suppressing less agreeable information.
That is true not only in dictatorships like those of Stalin,
Hitler and Saddam, but also in most democratic regimes. The successful
intelligence chief is an acrobat who walks between the raindrops
and knows how to adapt the intelligence data to the interests
of the political leadership.
For example: during most of the years
between the Six-day and the Yom-Kippur wars, Israel was ruled
by Golda Meir, a tough and not-very-wise person. She never dreamt
of returning the territories that had just been conquered. Her
Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan, the idol of the masses at the
time, declared that Sharm-al-Sheikh (in South Sinai) was more
important than peace. In order to sell these goods to the Israeli
public, it was necessary to present the Arab armies as a negligible
force, bands of nincompoops who would throw away their boots
and run the moment they saw an Israeli mess sergeant. Army intelligence
officially decided that an Egyptian attack had only "low
probability". Two thousand Israeli soldiers--and who knows
how many Egyptians and Syrians--paid for this with their lives.
From Golda to George, quite a short jump.
Bush wanted a war in Iraq. He could not disclose the real aim
to the public: to get his hands on the fabulous oil riches of
that country, to dominate the world's oil supplies and acquire
a stranglehold on the economies of Europe, Japan and any other
potential competitor. He needed a much more simple and compelling
reason: Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, he is in cahoots
with Bin-Laden, he is about to attack the United States.
To be convincing, authoritative-sounding
intelligence data were required. So the CIA produced documents,
already known to be false, showing Saddam trying to acquire uranium
in Niger. Put this into the President's State of the Union Address
and hop! there's your war.
Did the Americans get upset when the
lie was discovered? Not at all. So the President lied. Big deal.
And the CIA helped him to lie. Big deal again. The important
thing is that the sons of Saddam have been killed in a "targeted
elimination", Israeli-style. How wonderful!
But in the UK, things work differently.
There you have a political class and clear standards of what's
"done" and what's "not done". The intelligence
service tailored its reports to the requirements of Tony Blair.
He did not have to ask. As always, the intelligence people knew
what he needed and supplied the stories that could be "sexed
up" to taste. One of the experts informed the BBC, and sometimes
later his body was found. Maybe he really committed suicide.
Maybe.
England is in an uproar, and perhaps
Blair and his henchmen will suffer for it. In Israel, thank
God, there is no such problem. Our intelligence chiefs blabber,
blabber and blabber, and their prattle always suits the needs
of the Prime Minister. When Prime Ministers change, the prattle
of the intelligence chiefs changes accordingly.
Their masters' voice.
Uri Avnery
is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He
is one of the writers featured in The
Other Israel: Voices of Dissent and Refusal. One of his
essays is also included in Cockburn and St. Clair's forthcoming
book: The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at: avnery@counterpunch.org.
Weekend Edition Features for July 26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
NYT's Screws Up Again; Uday and
Qusay Deaths Bad for Bush; Gen. Hitchens at the Front
Gary
Leupp
Faith-Based Intelligence
Saul Landau
A Report from Syria
Stan
Goff
Bring 'Em On Home, Now!
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Book Cooking at Boeing
Andrew
Cockburn
The Sons Are Dead; Now the Blood Feud
Begins
Jason Leopold
CIA Points the Finger at the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans
Robert
Fisk
The Power of Death
Joanne
Mariner
Monsieur Moussaoui
M. Shahid
Alam
The Global Economy Since 1800: a Short History
Harry
Browne
Northern Ireland: the Other Faltering Peace Process
Fidel Castro
Moncada, 50 Years Later
Lula
Democracy Requires Social Justice
Edward
S. Herman
Refuting Brad DeLong's Smear Job on Noam Chomsky
Ron Jacobs
Guided by a Great Feeling of Love: a Review of Gordon's The Company
You Keep
Julie
Hilden
A Photographer, an Offer and Cameron Diaz's Topless Photos
Adam Engel
Man Talk
Poets'
Basement
Keeney, Witherup, Short, Nimba, Guthrie and Albert
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