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Today's
Stories
March 30, 2004
Bill Christison
The 9/11 Commission: Dangerous
Harbringer for the Future
March 29, 2004
John Maxwell
Crisis
in the Caribbean: a Miasma Foretold
J. Michael Springmann
Email
Spying & Attorney Client Privilege
Robert Fisk / Severin
Carrell
Coalition
of the Mercenaries
The Black Commentator
Haiti's Troika of Terror
Doug Giebel
Candide in the Wilderness:
How Bush Policy Was Made
David Krieger
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Bargain
Mike Whitney
Rejecting the Language of Terrorism
Richard Oxman
The Pitts: a 9/11 Burrow of an American
Family
Kim Scipes
The AFL-CIO in Venezuela: Deja Vu All Over Again
Michael Donnelly
End Game for Northwest Forests
Norman Solomon
The Media Politics of 9/11
Kathy Kelly
Last Lines Before Vanishing
Website of the Day
Swans: Can Money Buy Everything?
March 27 / 28, 2004
Jennifer Loewenstein
A
Journey to Rafah
Jeffrey St. Clair
Empire of the Locusts
Gary Leupp
The Yassin Assassination: Prelude to an Attack on Syria
William A. Cook
The Yassin Assassination: a Monstrous Insanity Blessed by the
US
Faheem Hussain
Some Thoughts on Waziristan: Once and Always a Colonial Army
Elaine Cassel
Is Playing Paintball Terrorism?
Larry Birns / Jessica
Leight
Disturbing Signals: Kerry and Latin America
John Ross
Bush Tells the World: "Drop Dead"
John Eskow
A Memo to Karl Rove from the Hollywood Caucus
Alan Maass
Who Are the Real Terrorists?
Dave Lindorff
Spineless of US Journalists
Joe Bageant
Howling in the Belly of the Confederacy
Dave Zirin
Reasonable Doubt: Why Barry Bonds is Not on Steroids
Craig Waggoner
Who Would Mel's Jesus Nuke?
The Kerry Quandry
Joel Wendland
Marxists
for Kerry
Josh Frank
Scary,
Scary John Kerry
Matt Vidal
Spoilers, Electability and the Poverty of American Democracy
Poets' Basement
LaMorticella, Hamod, Guthrie, Davies and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Say a Little Prayer
March 26, 2004
Christopher Brauchli
There's
a Chill Over the Country
Robert Fisk
The Man Who Knew Too Much: the Ordeal
of Mordechai Vanunu
Joe DeRaymond
Democracy in El Salvador? Think Again
Mike Whitney
Lessons on Apartheid from Ariel Sharon
Mickey Z.
Somalia and Iraq: Looking Back and Ahead
Chris Floyd
The Pentagon Archipelago
CounterPunch Photo Wire
Cheney's Close Shave?
John Breneman
Bush's Comic Bomb
Website of the Day
Dick
is a Killer
March 25, 2004
Lee Sustar
Who
is to Blame for Lost Jobs?
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Offshore Banking Centers
Roger Burbach
Lula vs. the IMF: Brazil Begins
to Throw Off the Austerity Planners
Jimmer Endres
Elections Without Politics: The Military Budget Is Not an "Issue"
Larry Tuttle
Acting in Your Name: Identity Theft and Public Interest Groups
Toni Solo
Misreporting Venezuela
Dan Bacher
A Memorial Wall for Iraq War's Dead and Wounded
Saul Landau
Is
Venezuela Next?
Website of the Day
The Spiral Railway
March 24, 2004
Gary Leupp
General
Musharraf's IOU
Richard Oxman
Shakespeare
for Kerry
William Lind
The Beginning
of Phase Three: 4G Warfare Hits Iraq
Rep. Ron Paul
Iraq One Year Later
Michael Dempsey
Killing Rachel Corrie Again
Alan Farago
The Bad Math of Mercury: Bush's War on the Unborn
Benjamin Dangl
and April Howard
Media
in Cuba
John L. Hess
No Lie Left Behind: Judy Miller Does Dick Clarke
Greg Weiher
Two Cheers for Dems: "We're Not as Bad as George"
Eva Golinger
An Open Letter to John Kerry on Venezuela
Grayson Childs
Where's Cynthia McKinney?
Steve Niva
Israel's Assassinations will Only
Fuel More Suicide Bombings
Website of the Day
The Bushiad and the Idiossey
March 23, 2004
Phillip Cryan
The
Drug War's Next Casualty: Colombia's National Parks
Ron Jacobs
They Shoot Men in Wheelchairs, Too?
Dave Lindorff
A Spanish Parallel: Scare Tactics and Elections
Mike Whitney
Richard Clarke and Teflon George
Brian McKinlay
Bush's Lil' Buddy in Trouble: John Howard Starts to Wobble
JG
Driving Mr. Koon: "Jim Crow Lives Next Door"
Phyllis Pollack
Gettin' Jigga with Metallica: the Battle Over the Double Black
CD
Ahmed Bouzid
Sharon's One-Way Track
Sean Carter
The G-Word Goes to Court: One Nation Under [Your Logo Here]
M. Shahid Alam
World's Greatest Country: Do the Facts Lie
March 22, 2004
Mazin Qumsiyeh
On Extrajudicial
Executions
Uri Avnery
The
Assassination of Sheikh Yassin is Worse Than a Crime
Gilad Atzmon
Sharon's Rampage
Mike Whitney
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: the Story of Captain James Yee
Jason Leopold
Firm With Ties to Cheney Faces Criminal Indictment in Cal Energy
Scam
Greg Moses
Stop
Walling and Stalling: a Report from Houston's Peace March
Phil Gasper
San Francisco: 25,000 March for an End to the Occupation
Lenni Brenner
Report
from NYC: Old and Young Parade for Peace
Julian Borger
The Clarke Revelations
Steve Perry
Karl Rove's Moment
Website of the Day
Enviros Against War
March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
Jeffrey St. Clair
Intolerable Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe: What Would Lilburne
Do?
Ted Honderich
Tony Blair's Moral Responsibility for Atrocities
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
The Plot Against Syria: an Irresponsibility Act
Gary Leupp
On Viewing "The Passion of the Christ"
William A. Cook
Fence, Barrier, Wall
Phil Gasper
Bush v. Bush-lite: Chomsky's Lesser Evilism
Ron Jacobs
Fox News and the Masters of War
John Stanton
Which Way John Kerry? The Senator's Inner Nixon
Justin Felux
Kerry and Black America: Just Another Stupid White Man
Mike Whitney
Greenspan's Treason: Swindling Posterity
Augustin Velloso
Avoiding Osama's Abyss
Lawrence Magnuson
Eyes Wide Open: Is Spain Caving in to Terrorism?
Kathy Kelly
Getting Together to Defeat Terrorism
Tracy McLellan
Scalia & Cheney: Happiness is a Warm Gun
Kurt Nimmo
Emma Goldman for President!
Luis J. Rodriguez
The Redemptive Power of Art: It's Not a Frill
Mickey Z
The Michael Moore Diet
Jackie Corr
When Harry Truman Stopped in Butte
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Great Trial of 1922: Gandhi's Vision of Responsibility
Poets' Basement
Stew Albert & JD Curtis
Website of the Weekend
Virtual World Election
March 19, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Zapatero
to Kerry: Back Off, Senator, Our Troops are Coming Home
Ann Harrison
So
Protesters, How Well Do You Know Your Rights?
William MacDougall
Fortress Britain's War on "Economic Migrants"
Greg Moses
Sold American: Cowboy Nation Gets Ready to Vote
Cynthia McKinney
Haiti and the Impotence of Black America: Roll Back This Coup,
Mr. Bush
Norman Solomon
Spinning the Past; Threatening the Future
John L. Hess
"Missing" Evidence and the NYTs
Vicente Navarro
The
End of Aznar, Bush's Best Friend
Website of the War
Naming the Dead
March 18, 2004
Gila Svirsky
Rachel
Corrie, One Year Later: She Never Lost Faith in Decency
Christopher Brauchli
Drilling a Hole in the Sanctions: How Halliburton Made $73 Million
from Saddam
William Kulin
Report from Iraq: Just Another Baghdad Car Bombing
Mike Whitney
Resistance: a Moral Imperative
Rep. Ron Paul
Broadcast Indecency Act: an Indecent Attack on the First Amendment
Josh Frank
The Nader Question
Jack Random
They Lied & They Lost: Madrid and the Lessons of Democracy
Greg Bates
What Makes a Nader Voter Tick? A Survey
Sam Hamod / Alfredo Reyes
Contempt of the World: Hastert, Bush and Cheney on Spain
Gary Leupp
The
Madrid Bombings: the Chickens Come Home to Roost
Website of the Day
Privatizing Armageddon: Buy Your Own Doomsday Key
March 17, 2004
Marjorie Cohn
Spain, the EU and the US: War on
Terror or Civil Liberties?
David MacMichael
Untruth
and Consequences
Michael Donnelly
Wear the Green, But Skip the Green Beer
Tom Stephens
"Steady Leadership": Let the Buyer Beware
Wayne Madsen
Sen. Kerry, Let Me Help You Out
Karyn Strickler
Who Owns the Sierra Club? Anonymous Donors and Rigged Elections
Peter Linebaugh
Bush:
Blanc Blanc
March 16, 2004
Lenni Brenner
James
Madison: the Anti-Clerical Father of the Bill of Rights
Scott Boehm
Madrid
Diary: How to Change World Order in Four Days
Alexander Lynch
From Franco to Aznar: the History
Behind the Spanish Elections
Sam Hamod and Alfredo
Reyes
The Truth About the Spanish Elections: Aznar Was Going Down Anyway
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
You Wouldn't Do a Dog This Way:
Executing David Clayton Hill
Mike Whitney
The Case for a Nuclear Iran
Robert Fisk
The Bloody Price of the "War
on Terror"
Bill Christison
The
Aftershocks from Madrid
CounterPunch Photo Wire
The Passion of St. Teresa
Website of the Day
Join the War on Art!
March 15, 2004
Harry Browne
Terror Nothing New to Europe
Mike Whitney
Justice
Not Murder: the Tragic Symmetry of Terrorism
Lidice Valenzuela
Haiti: a Coup without Consultation
Greg Moses
Lessons
from the Texas Primaries: Looking for a Coalition with Legs
Mickey Z.
Depraved Indifference: C-Sections, Patriarchy & Women's Health
Asaf Shtull-Trauring
AWOL
in New York: From Refusenik to Organizer
CounterPunch Wire
Gen. Gramajo Executed by Bees!
March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
March
29, 2004
The Import of the 9/11 Commission
The
Hearings Concentrate on Side Issues, But Provide Dangerous Harbingers
for the Future
By BILL CHRISTISON
former
CIA analyst
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon
the United States, chaired by former New Jersey governor Thomas
Kean and better known as the 9/11 Commission, entertained news
junkies across America with two full days of hearings last week.
The ex-governor, chosen in part for his low visibility when a
replacement had to be found for the controversial Henry Kissinger,
did a creditable enough job as the entertainment MC. He and his
mixed crew of good and not-so-good ex-officials, politicians,
and perpetual staff aides spread before us not one but several
partisan versions of how well or how badly the intelligence and
foreign-policymaking arms of a Democratic and then a Republican
administration performed over the past decade.
For students of politics and the internal
workings of governments and bureaucracies, the exercise undoubtedly
provided a few useful historical insights. The commission's final
report, when issued in the summer of 2004, may even contain helpful
recommendations for reorganizing governmental intelligence and
foreign-policymaking mechanisms -- helpful, that is, to the leaders
of the world's only nation-state that presently seeks military
domination over the entire globe.
To the remaining citizens of the U.S.
and the world, however, it was at best one more Roman circus
distracting us from what should be our main goal: PERSUADING
WASHINGTON TO SCRAP ITS FOREIGN AND MILITARY POLICIES THAT FOSTER
U.S. GLOBAL DOMINATION AND AN AGGRESSIVE ISRAELI-U.S.
PARTNERSHIP IN DOMINATING THE MIDDLE EAST. These are the dangerous
policies that both Bill Clinton's and George W. Bush's administrations,
with only minor differences of emphasis, have pressed on an unwilling
world. Earlier administrations had similar goals, but serious
policy steps toward fulfilling those goals became much more feasible
-- or at least seemed to U.S. leaders to be more feasible --
after the disappearance of the Soviet Union. These policy steps
also fitted nicely with the needs of the principal financial
backers of both major U.S. political parties for more aggressive
U.S. policies that would encourage a continuation and expansion
of their own profits.
The website of the 9/11 Commission states
that it is "an independent, bipartisan commission created
by congressional legislation and the signature of President George
W. Bush in late 2002," and that it is "chartered to
prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding
the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, including preparedness
for and the immediate response to the attacks. The Commission
is also mandated to provide recommendations designed to guard
against future attacks."
The final sentence just quoted would
allow the Commission, if it wished, to recommend changes in U.S.
policies that generate ever more hatred against America and thereby
perpetuate terrorism. On the other hand, the Commission may narrowly
interpret the phrase "designed to guard against future attacks"
to mean it should recommend only organizational and tactical
actions intended to intensify and make more effective U.S. implementation
of the so-called "war on terror," and also reduce the
chances of future terrorist surprises embarrassing to the U.S.
The latter course is the one the 9/11
Commission will almost certainly take, since neither of our major
political parties wants significant changes in U.S. foreign and
military policies. With John Kerry as the presumptive Democratic
candidate, the only policy changes that he is likely to favor
in these fields will be in matters of tone, such as listening
more courteously to allies, and less obvious displays of trigger-happiness.
He might, in addition, slow down the outrageously expensive and
wasteful anti-ballistic missile program, but he would not stop
it. His bread too is buttered by the same financiers that underwrite
Bush.
The members of the 9/11 Commission, both
Republicans and Democrats, are in the same club. Nothing in the
hearings of March 23-24 suggests that any member will cut the
leash that ties him or her to the military-industrial establishment.
Note also that the charter of the Commission limits its role
to "the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks," so it will definitely pass no judgments
on, for instance, the later establishment of a Pentagon intelligence
unit, the Office of Special Plans, entirely outside the intelligence
community with the specific purpose of providing distortions
and lies to encourage the American people to support the invasion
of Iraq.
The highlight of the hearings, of course,
was the testimony of former White House counterterrorism chief
Richard Clarke and the simultaneous publication of Clarke's book,
both of which demonstrated fairly conclusively that the Bush
administration had not, in its first eight months, given a very
high priority to developing a coherent counterterrorism policy.
Clarke provoked an orgy of activity from the wounded Bushies
designed to discredit him, but he produced no smoking gun to
prove real negligence on Bush's part beyond a generalized unwillingness
to copy any Clinton policy on any subject. The affair has mildly
damaged Bush's image as a decisive leader, but the injury is
nowhere near fatal to his reelection campaign. Furthermore, Clarke
himself espouses such one-sided and utterly uncompromising views
against terrorism that he is unlikely to provide much support
in coming months to those of us who want to change U.S. foreign
policies.
So Clarke is also a distraction and part
of the Roman circus. It is doubtful that he will draw more than
a few votes away from Bush next November, unless his revelations,
which by themselves are not of crashing importance, induce someone
else to come forward with a real smoking gun. For example, if
anyone produced truly strong evidence that the FBI report of
an al-Qaida member learning to fly but not to take off
or land an airliner had in fact been provided to the White House
before September 11, that would change many peoples' calculations
about where responsibility for the 9/11 fiasco lies. Another
recent story, appearing on Salon.com, is also worth watching.
A former FBI wiretap translator with top-secret security clearance,
who has been called "very credible" by Sen. Charles
Grassley, R-Iowa, has told Salon she recently testified to the
9/11 Commission that the FBI had detailed information prior to
September 11 that a terrorist attack involving airplanes was
being plotted. Again, if anyone provides evidence that such a
report was passed to the White House before 9/11, this too could
change a lot of political calculations in Washington. At the
moment, the evidence is simply not there to conclude that either
of these reports will seriously damage the Bush administration.
The March 23-24 hearings, however, do
provide a few dangerous harbingers for the future that may be
of secondary importance in the short run but become more important
as time passes.
Further Expansions
of Intelligence and Covert Actions Planned
That the world is likely to be subjected
to a further upsurge of U.S. intelligence activities and covert
actions will not be news to many of us, but it still is noteworthy.
This trend has been developing for the last four years or so.
The testimony and the written submission of Director of Central
Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet show most clearly the continuities
of the two administrations, since Tenet served both under Clinton
and under Bush. Under both, terrorism (as defined by the U.S.)
and military actions initiated by the U.S. have resulted in a
major expansion of U.S. intelligence services, particularly in
the areas of personnel and career opportunities in both the analytical
and the covert action and collection components of the CIA. More
is to come.
If you accept as valid the views that
terrorism against the U.S. and its allies is entirely the fault
of those whom the U.S. labels enemies, and that military actions
initiated by the U.S. are entirely defensive and therefore valid,
then you will see nothing wrong with the massive expansion of
the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies (or for that matter
the expansion of our overt military services). But if you are
skeptical of these views, then you should also understand that
most people of the world will regard this surging growth of U.S.
intelligence activities as immoral and as representing a truly
absurd and crazy excess in the American political system that
should be opposed by every thoughtful person.
Most Americans do not realize the extremely
negative effect that a global expansion of CIA activities, particularly
covert actions, has on other peoples. It seems almost impossible
for the U.S. to avoid bragging about strengthening its intelligence
capabilities while at the same time coyly claiming that it cannot
reveal the details for reasons of security. It is just one more
form of arrogance that the U.S. displays, and it simply intensifies
global hatred of the U.S. The covertness of what the CIA does
makes the blowback worse. The use of covert action by the U.S.
should be reduced, not expanded. Any instances of it that are
uncovered become a cause of more terrorism. The U.S. literally
encourages this. Governments around the world can easily obtain
and study every unclassified briefing that Tenet gives, and newspapers,
TV, and radio in other nations revel in spreading and embellishing
stories about what the CIA says it is doing.
The unclassified oral briefing that Tenet
gave on March 24 was a summary of a lengthy written statement
given to every Commission member. The entire statement was immediately
available on the CIA website. It is a blueprint for vastly increased
covert activities. The global dominators running Washington these
days probably think it is a great idea to show the rest of the
world how easy it is for the U.S. to increase its covert capabilities
against other nations and sub-national groups, and how futile
it is for others to try to stand up to the U.S. But the other
side of it is the hatred this produces -- always more hatred.
In the written statement, Tenet starts
out by poor-mouthing his way through the "peace dividend"
years after the Soviet Union fell apart. The document states
that "during the 1990s our intelligence community funding
declined in real terms, reducing our buying power by tens of
billions of dollars over the decade. We lost nearly one in four
of our positions. . . . By the mid-1990s recruitment of new CIA
analysts and case officers had come to a virtual halt. NSA was
hiring no new technologists during the greatest information technology
change in our lifetimes. . . . With the al-Qaida threat
growing more ominous and with our resources devoted to countering
it clearly inadequate, we began taking money and people away
from other critical areas to improve our efforts against terrorism.
Despite the resource reductions, . . . we managed to triple intelligence-wide
funding for counterterrorism from fiscal year 1990 to 1999."
After the earlier statements, this tripling of the money for
counterterrorism is a real eye-opener, meant to suggest that
Tenet is a genius of a manager for doing so much with so few
resources.
The paper points out that FY 1999 was
the first year during the decade of the nineties in which the
intelligence community received a "significant infusion
of new money," and that other supplemental infusions followed
in subsequent years. Tenet then writes, "In CIA alone, I
count the equivalent of 700 officers working counterterrorism
in August 2001 at both headquarters and in the field." He
adds, however, "Nonetheless, it will take many more years
to recover the capabilities we lost during the resource decline
of the 1990s." Later in the paper, he talks about the need
for better integration between the intelligence community in
Washington and state and local officials. For this purpose, he
says, "Large, sustained budget infusions will be required
separate from our other resource needs."
From this shopping list, readers throughout
the world can see that the U.S. intelligence community assumes
it soon will have a great deal more money to spend than it has
now. Will these same readers be cowed by all this, or will their
antagonisms against the U.S. behemoth simply grow stronger? As
intelligence and covert actions become
increasingly important as an identifiable, separate, and growing
arm of U.S. global policies, should not questions be raised by
Americans about the ignoble image of the U.S. this trend
presents to the world? Do we lack so much confidence in our own
overt policies -- our alleged support for democracy, for example
-- that we have to rely increasingly on covert actions? To repeat
the obvious, these questions will become more rather than less
important unless we change our foreign and military policies
in major ways. Starting right now.
Assassinations
The Israeli military has been assassinating
Palestinians accused of terrorism, or of organizing and directing
terrorism, for some years. The U.S. government has approved these
assassinations, or at most has issued exceedingly mild criticisms
on some occasions. But when it comes to proposals for assassinations
that might be committed by the CIA, the differing views in the
government that have come to light so far in the 9/11 hearings
are remarkable. The reason for the differences goes back at least
to 1976, when President Gerald Ford issued an executive order
decreeing that "no person employed by or acting on behalf
of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire
to engage in, assassination." That period immediately after
the Vietnam War saw an upsurge of harsh criticism of the CIA
for its covert actions from the 1950s through the early 1970s.
This writer knows of no evidence that Ford's executive order
has ever been formally rescinded.
But times change, of course, and by the
late 1990s the Clinton administration was quite openly calling
for the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden, although not publicly
using the word assassination. The Bush administration has continued
these calls and has freely talked about wanting bin Laden "dead
or alive." The unclassified version of the 9/11 Commission's
staff report, however, contains considerable evidence of conflict.
The excerpts below are drastically abbreviated. The
entire document makes fascinating reading and can be found on
the internet.
"Many CIA officers, including Deputy
Director for Operations Pavitt, have criticized policy-makers
for not giving the CIA [the proper] authorities to conduct effective
operations against bin Laden. . . .
"[With respect to] President Clinton,
NSC staff and CIA officials differ starkly here. Senior NSC staff
members told us they believe the president's intent was clear:
He wanted bin Laden dead. . . .
"As former National Security Adviser
Berger explained, if we wanted to kill bin Laden with cruise
missiles, why would we not want to kill him with covert action?
. . .
"[But] every CIA official interviewed
on this topic by the Commission, from DCI Tenet to the official
who actually briefed the agents in the field, told us they had
heard a different message.
"What the United States would let
the military do is quite different, Tenet said, from the rules
that govern covert action by the CIA. CIA senior managers, operators
and lawyers uniformly said that they read the relevant authorities
signed by President Clinton as instructing them to try to capture
bin Laden. . . .
"They believed that the only acceptable
context for killing bin Laden was a credible capture operation.
Quote, We always talked about how much easier it would have been
to kill him, end of quote, a former chief of the bin Laden station
said. [Elsewhere, the document reveals that the CIA's Directorate
of Operations established what was dubbed a "station"
in Washington to handle the pursuit of bin Laden. CIA "stations"
are usually established in foreign capitals to deal with operations
in those countries.]
". . . To further cloud the picture,
two senior CIA officers told us they would have been morally
and practically opposed to getting CIA into what might look like
an assassination. One of them, a former counterterrorism center
chief, said that he would have refused an order to directly kill
bin Laden.
"Where [both sides] agree is that
no one at CIA, including Tenet and Pavitt, ever complained to
the White House that the authorities were restrictive or unclear.
Berger told us, quote: If there was ever any confusion, it was
never conveyed to me or the president by the DCI or anybody else,
end of quote . . .
"But absent a more dependable government
strategy, CIA senior management [did not push for more specific
instructions] . . . through both the late Clinton and early Bush
administrations."
What seems to be happening here is that
in the years before September 11, neither the Clinton nor the
Bush administration was willing to put in writing an explicit
assassination order to the CIA, and CIA leaders, remembering
that the Agency had been badly and deservedly burned in a similar
situation almost thirty years earlier, dragged their heels and
possibly avoided even trying to carry out an assassination that
both administrations wanted. It is fairly clear that Tenet thought
the U.S. military might have no such compunctions; he simply
did not want to steer the CIA into such a morass on his watch.
But it is also fairly clear that he did not choose openly to
confront either administration on the issue -- at least not before
September 11. His position now, in the aftermath of September
11, may or may not be different. We simply have no information.
The best guess is that he would prefer to avoid the issue as
long as possible, and if the military under Donald Rumsfeld wants
to solve the problem for him, copying the Israeli military, he
probably would not mind.
Pressures are almost inevitably mounting
within the Bush administration in support of more assassinations
The peace movements of the U.S. and the world ought to be out
there with all the strength they can muster, opposing assassinations
everywhere. They are always extralegal and immoral, and the perpetrators
are always the prosecution, defense, judge, and jury all rolled
into one. Furthermore, as a practical matter, one assassination
often encourages others, and any leader who supports an assassination
had better watch his own rear. Needless to say, assassinations
would be yet another kind of action seen as displaying the arrogance
of Americans toward other peoples, and one more entry in the
catalog of reasons for hating the United States.
Bill Christison
joined the CIA in 1950 and worked on the analysis side of the
Agency for over 28 years. In the 1970s he served as a National
Intelligence Officer (principal adviser of the Director of Central
Intelligence) for Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Africa. Before
his retirement in 1979, he was Director of the CIA's Office of
Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit. He can be
reached at: christison@counterpunch.org
Weekend
Edition Features for March 20 / 21, 2004
Jennifer Loewenstein
A
Journey to Rafah
Jeffrey St. Clair
Empire of the Locusts
Gary Leupp
The Yassin Assassination: Prelude to an Attack on Syria
William A. Cook
The Yassin Assassination: a Monstrous Insanity Blessed by the
US
Faheem Hussain
Some Thoughts on Waziristan: Once and Always a Colonial Army
Elaine Cassel
Is Playing Paintball Terrorism?
Larry Birns / Jessica
Leight
Disturbing Signals: Kerry and Latin America
John Ross
Bush Tells the World: "Drop Dead"
John Eskow
A Memo to Karl Rove from the Hollywood Caucus
Alan Maass
Who Are the Real Terrorists?
Joe Bageant
Howling in the Belly of the Confederacy
Dave Zirin
Reasonable Doubt: Why Barry Bonds is Not on Steroids
Craig Waggoner
Who Would Mel's Jesus Nuke?
The Kerry Quandry
Joel Wendland
Marxists
for Kerry
Josh Frank
Scary,
Scary John Kerry
Matt Vidal
Spoilers, Electability and the Poverty of American Democracy
Poets' Basement
LaMorticella, Hamod, Guthrie, Davies and Albert
Website of the Weekend
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