Today's Stories

July 31 - August 2, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Biden and Clinton Mutinies

July 30, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Victims of a Covert Tit-for-Tat War

Gareth Porter
Afghanistan's US-Backed Child-Raping Police

Saul Landau
Summer of Denial

Greg Grandin
Honduran Coup Over?

Ray Bourgeois / Margaret Knapke
School of Coups

Diane Farsetta
Pentagon Pundits Get a Pass

Stephen Soldz
The King Case, the APA and the Missing Ethics Investigation

Alan Farago
Learning How to Survive in a Depression From "Weeds"

David Macaray
Cops and Labor Unions

Mike Howells /
Jay Arena
Volunteerism Will Not Rebuild the Gulf Coast

Christopher Brauchli
Oatmeal Envy

Website of the Day
Changing the SOFA

July 29, 2009

Carl Ginsburg
Our Crisis, Their Gain

Clifton Ross
From Tegucigalpa to El Paraiso: a Voyage From Curfew to State of Siege

Paul Craig Roberts
How Fake is the "Recovery"?

Franklin C. Spinney
Winning Hearts and Minds, Pentagon Style

James Bovard Lackawanna Six: Bogus Charges and Martial Law

Anthony DiMaggio
Health Care, the Media and Public Opinion

Bouthaina Shaaban
How Will Arabs Wake Up?

Greg Moses
A Catch and Trade Policy for Labor Costs

Wajahat Ali
No Racism in Obama's Post-Race America?

Gary Leupp
Beer Will Not Solve This

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Musharraf, Imran Khan and Overseas Pakistanis

Website of the Day
Why Single-Payer Gets No Respect

July 28, 2009

Jean Bricmont
Bombing for a Juster World?

Uri Avnery
Obama, Netanyahu and the Settlements

Dean Baker
Right to Rent: a Remedy for the Foreclosure Crisis

Heather Gray
Stupid Cop Tricks: Driving Too Close to a White Female and Other Episodes in Racist Policing

Jonathan Cook
Can an "Arab Soul" Yearn for Israel's Anthem?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Beyond the F-22: the Future of Pentagon Reform

Belén Fernández
Thomas Friedman Does Afghanistan

Carl Finamore
The Hotel Workers' Kickass Local 2

Eli Jelly-Schapiro
Striking the World Cup

Harvey Wasserman
We All Stand Before Peltier's Parole Board

Website of the Day
Behind the Wheel

July 27, 2009

Ishmael Reed
Gates: Post-Race Scholar Yells Racism

Patrick Cockburn
Elections Shake Kurdistan

Roger Burbach
Hillary and Obama Nix Change in Honduras

Steve Breyman
Bomber Joe and Russia: Why is Biden Channeling Cheney?

Ramzy Kysia
Gaza: On the Right of Resistance

Stephen Soldz
Will the American Psychological Association Renounce the Nuremberg Defense?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Sexual Hocus Pocus in the Episcopal Church

Greg Moses
The Color Line is Black

Binoy Kampmark
Swine Flu Panic

Kim Ives
Lavalas and Haiti's Student Union Unite

Website of the Day
Meet the Paid Assassins of Health Care

July 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
"A Damned Murder, Inc."

Clifton Ross
Surreal Honduras

Patrick Cockburn
Party of "Change" Challenges Old Guard in Kurdistan

William Polk
Report Card on Obama From a New Frontiersman

David Sterritt
Screening the Politics Out of the Iraq War

Ray McGovern
Hooded in Bush's Hood

David Lindorff
Cops Gone Wild

Hannah Mermelstein
"The War is With the Arabs"

Carl Ginsburg
The Actually Existing Health Care System

Helen Redmond
The Selling of Single-Payer Features

John Ross
The Song of the Guerrilla

Bill Simpich
Fair Play for Cuba and the Cuban Revolution

Mark Weisbrot
Learning From China on How to Beat the Recession

Lee Sustar
U.S. Labor in Crisis

David Macaray
Union Workers Forced to Accept Massive Cuts

Felipe Matsunaga
Obama's Slow (and Familiar) Dance With Cuba

Sara Mann
Why Health Care Will Kill My TV

Martha Rosenberg
Which is Worse? Germs in Our Food or the Antibiotics That Kill Them?

Missy Beattie
Cha-ching Culture

David Ker Thomson
Empty Nest: a Natural History of Now

Ron Jacobs
United4Iran, a Footnote

Stephen Martin
The Crying of Lots 1 Thru 50

David Yearsley
Psst, I Show You a Feelthy Gluck

Gilad Atzmon
Bruno: a Glimpse Into Zionism?

Kim Nicolini
Guilty Laughter in the Dark: Seeing Brüno Twice

Poets' Basement
Kakak and McLellan

Website of the Weekend
Dead Prez: Summertime

July 23, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Masters of Perfidy: AIG and the System

Saul Landau /
Nelson Valdés
Hypocrisy and the Honduran Coup: Term Limits Only Apply When Governments Help People

Jonathan Cook
The Reality of Israel's "Open" Jerusalem

Nadia Hijab
Israeli Warships in the Red Sea

Dave Lindorff
Living in a Police State: the Gates Incident

Laura Carlsen
21st Century Coups d'Etat

Steve Breyman
Bankers Beware?

Ellen Brown
How California Could Turn Its IOUs Into Dollars

Norman Solomon
Spinning Health Care

Jorge Mariscal
Youth Activists Demand Military-Free Schools

Website of the Day
Copy-Editing Sarah Palin

July 22, 2009

Bernard Chazelle
How to Argue Against Torture

Nikolas Kozloff
The Coup and the U.S. Airbase in Honduras

Carl Ginsburg
The Recovery, Phase Two

Clifton Ross
Back to the Future? Return to El Salvador

Anthony DiMaggio
Health Care, Media and the Case for Socialized Medicine

Michael Donnelly
The Whoppers Behind WOPR

Nadia Hijab
Memoirs of a Lost Arab World

Dedrick Muhammad
Structural Inequality: News Not Fit to Print?

Charles Thomson
Cronyism at the Tate

Alan Farago
Ted Williams and the Florida Keys

Website of the Day
Himmelstein: Howard Dean is a Liar

July 21, 2009

Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Iranian Election and Its Aftermath

Uri Avnery
Breaking the Silence on Israeli War Crimes

Dean Baker
Séance on Wall Street

Jonathan Cook
Team Twitter: Israel's Internet War

Dave Lindorff
Saving Private Bergdahl

Andy Worthington
Interrogating the Uighurs

David Macaray
Heat, Dust and OSHA

Carl Finamore
The Deferential Party

Harvey Wasserman
Cronkite and Three Mile Island

Walter Brasch
The Marie Antoinettes of Health Care

Website of the Day
Linebaugh: Magna Carta and the Commons

July 20, 2009

Pam Martens
Judicial Apartheid

Nikolas Kozloff
Honduras and the Big Stick: Obama's Bullish Behavoir in Latin America

Paul Craig Roberts
Threatening Iran

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Policy on China and Iran

Ira Glunts
Netanyahu's Time Bomb: Building in the Vineyard of the Mufti

P. Sainath
Put Your Money Down, Boys

Binoy Kampmark
The Moon Landing and the Cold War

Stephen Fleischman
The First Anchorman

Norman Solomon
Cronkite and Vietnam: Beyond the Hype

Andy Worthington
Predictable Chaos as Gitmo Trials Resume

Ron Jacobs
Out of the Haze, Into the Darkness: Recalling 1979

Website of the Day
Why Publishing Can't be Saved (as it is)

July 17-19, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
"Watch What We Do, Not What We Say"

Nikolas Kozloff
Chiquita in Latin America: From Arbenz to Zelaya

Joanne Mariner
CIA Apples: Bad at the Top of the Tree

Joe Bageant
America's White Underclass

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Road Signs: Wiping Arabic Names Off the Map

Saul Landau
Why So Much Sympathy for Madoff's Dupes and So Little for the Poor?

John Ross
Jurassic Fallout in Mexico

Sue Sturgis
Senator Sessions, Race and Impartiality

Anita Sinha /
Daniel Farbman
The Ricci Case and the Myth of Special Treatment

Peter Morici
Obama's Donut Economics

Pervez Hoodbhoy
Whither Pakistan? A Five-Year Forecast

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the Language of Power

Greg Moses
The Real Demand Crisis

Kia Mistilis
The Niger Delta Crisis

Missy Beattie
The Placebo President

David Ker Thomson
How Not to See: Things to Tell Your Eyeballs

James G. Abourezk
Evil Spirits: the Booze Strip in Indian Country

Paul Richards
Why Does Jon Tester Want to Log Wild Montana?

Dave Lindorff
Dark Days for Working People (With Three Small Rays of Light)

Marc Levy
Just Like Hanoi Jane

Matt Siegfried
The Good War Goes Hot

Stephen Martin
Panopticon Blues

Ben Sonnenberg
Sembène's Faat Kiné

David Macaray
Casablanca: When Melodrama Trumped History

Charles R. Larson
A Pakistani, Victorian Novel Celebrating Women

David Yearsley
That's Women for You: Abbas Kiarostami's Così

Lorenzo Wolff
Death Rattle and Roll: the Sound From England's Gutters

Poets' Basement
Payne, Anderson and Williams

Website of the Weekend
Hitler Learns of Sarah Palin's Resignation

July 16, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
What Economy?

Afshin Rattansi Iranian Planes and the Hidden Toll of Economic Sanctions

Gregory V. Button
The Search for Environmental Justice in Perry County, Alabama

Evan Knappenberger
Profile of a Deserter

Michelle Bollinger
Why is Leonard Peltier Still in Prison?

Russell Mokhiber
White House to ABC News: No Obama Single-Payer Doc

Belén Fernández
Iranian Penetration, Oh My!

Alice Walker
What is Torture Like? A Letter to Obama

Nicholas Dearden
Paying the Climate Debt: the G-8's Troubling Model

Albert Osueke
Sotomayor and the Identity Mountain

Website of the Day
Sotomayor for the Prosecution

July 15, 2009

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Assassination Bureau

Vijay Prashad
A Political Recession

Dean Baker
Stimulus Arithmetic

Ray McGovern
Cheney Sweating Bullets

Jonathan Cook
Jenin's Model of "Economic Peace"

David Rosen
Shouts From the Gallery: the Sotomayor Hearings and the Culture Wars

Eric Walberg
Uighurs vs. Afghans: a Study in Contrast

Greg Moses
Three Dimensions of a Complete Stimulus Plan

Sousan Hammad
Decolonizing Israel

Binoy Kampmark
The Trial of Charles Taylor

Tracy McLellan
The Story of My Arrest

Website of the Day
11 Days in Saudi Gitmo

July 14, 2009

Eamonn McCann
The Emperors of Bombast: Bono, U2 and the Crisis of World Capitalism

Joanne Mariner
Obama's New Euphemism

Franklin Spinney
The Taliban Rope-a-Dope

Steve Heilig
Walking Mount Tam: an Interview with Gary Snyder

Ali Abunimah
Hamas' Choice

Dave Lindorff
The End of "Nice" Health Care Reform

Nikolas Kozloff
The Politics of Destabilization: McCain and Honduras

Ellen Brown
From Golden State to Subprime State

Alice Slater
How US Missile Defense Plans Sabotaged Nuclear Disarmament Talks With Russia

Ron Jacobs
Protest U.S. Aggression

Joe Allen
The Fight to Save James Hickman in Jim Crow-Style Chicago

Website of the Day
Mel Brooks Does the French Revolution

July 13, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Essence of the Regime

Mike Whitney
The Deflating Economy

P. Sainath
How the World Depression Hits Orissa

Gareth Porter
A US / Iraq Conflict on Iran

Paul Moore
Rap in the Streets, Rap in the Suites

Tim Wise
Off the Deep End: Private Clubs, Public Prejudice

Andy Worthington Former Insider Shatters Credibility of Military Commissions

David Macaray
Cartoon Voices: Serf's Up in Hollywood

Cal Winslow
The Healthcare Worker War

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Spring in the Time of Obama

Website of the Day
Washington's Deep Game with China

July 10-12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Biden Problem

José Pertierra
The Cuban Five: a Cold War Case in a Post-Cold War World

John Ross
After the Honduran Coup

Conn Hallinan
The Settlements and the Quartet

Nikolas Kozloff
C Street Band: Sex Scandals, Moral Hypocrisy and the Far Right Agenda in Latin America

Clifton Ross /
Marcy Rein
U.S. and Honduras: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Good Neighbor

Carl Ginsburg
Summers' Clouded Crystal Ball

Michael Neumann
Say It Loud, Say It Proud: There is No God!

Gilad Atzmon
The Left and Islam: Thinking Outside of the Secular Box

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Parable of the Golden Parachute

Ellen Hodgson Brown
California Dreamin': How the State Can Beat Its Budget Woes

Jim Goodman
Rural America Needs More Than Listening Sessions

Christopher Bickerton
Europe's New Politics of Hard Times

Wendell Potter
Health Care Industry Adopts Tobacco Lobby's Tactics

Dave Lindorff
CIA Lies: Why Isn't Congress in Open Revolt?

David Ker Thomson
Switchbacking Toward Bastille Day

Anthony DiMaggio
The Michael Jackson Feeding Frenzy

Raymond Lawrence
Michael Jackson as Sexual Pervert: the Calumnies of Peter King

Walid El Houri
Neda and Marwa: a Tale of Two Murdered Women

Stephanie Westbrook
Yes, We Camp

Roger Gaess
The Shades of Highgate Cemetery

David Yearsley
Tara, America's Dream House

Kim Nicolini
Caution: Men at Work, Robbing Banks

Poets' Basement
Five Poems From the Japanese

Website of the Weekend
Free Tiga and Hugh!

Weekend Edition
July 31 - August 2, 2009

The Intelligence Oversight Mess

Rectifying the Hit-Team Affair

By JOHN PRADOS

Americans recently learned that the CIA dreamed up a plan to use "hit teams" of assassins to wipe out terrorist leaders and gather intelligence about them. More than that, congressional overseers of intelligence were deliberately kept in the dark, per orders from Vice President Richard Cheney.

The White House — the executive branch — should have learned its lesson long ago. And not just about schemes to create hit teams. Bush administration defenders are wrong to argue that this is a mere political charge over a plan that never left the drawing board. Far from some empty dispute over technicalities, today's controversy over whether the Central Intelligence Agency kept the oversight committees in Congress fully and currently informed regarding this significant, planned CIA operation is not new. Indeed, this struggle has been at the heart of efforts to implement a system of legislative monitoring of intelligence activities since the creation of the oversight system in the 1970s.

In fact, the specific questions of what activities have to be divulged and when Congress is to be informed of them — as well as who has to be told — are precisely the core issues. That there is a controversy at all is the result of the Bush administration's misguided notion that the way to work with overseers was to keep them away from the most questionable intelligence activities. A review of the struggle over congressional briefings yields significant insights.

Congress Out of the Loop

Congress established its oversight committees in the wake of investigations of U.S. intelligence, carried out in 1975 by special panels of both houses. Legislators angered by haphazard CIA operations in Angola created the requirement to report CIA activities during that season of inquiry by amending the foreign aid bill. The law provided that committees of both the House and Senate, with jurisdiction over foreign affairs or intelligence, be informed of operations that were to be justified by a "presidential finding" or notification. The White House and CIA believed the system, which in practice requiring briefing eight committees with 163 members, too cumbersome. Under the Carter administration, they replaced the legislation with provisions to inform the congressional oversight committees alone. Importantly, activities other than covert operations were to be routinely briefed to Congress.

What information was to be provided and when remained undefined. At the time of the Iran hostage crisis the Carter administration avoided telling Congress of the planned U.S. rescue mission (that ended tragically at Desert One) until after it had failed. A furious Congress at that time widened the range of activities requiring notification to include planned actions. The Reagan administration then resorted to "retroactive" presidential findings — and even the "mental" finding that Reagan had intended to issue but never did — to justify its actions in the Iran-Contra affair. That, plus Bill Casey's stretching of conventional findings in his secret wars — especially that in Nicaragua — led to the most extensive reform of the oversight system. A whole series of thresholds, including timing, expense size, duration, and so on, became criteria for congressional notification.

The "rules," however, were informal understandings between Congress and the White House. In 1989, during the first Bush administration, Congress moved to formalize the notification criteria in legislation. The package included a provision that no covert operation under any circumstances could be withheld from Congress for more than 48 hours. Seeking to head off such a statute, President George H. W. Bush gave Congress written assurances of "timely" notification, though he reserved the right to keep operations secret if necessary. Congress then inserted language formalizing the notification system in the 1991 intelligence authorization bill. Although the White House and Congress agreed to the terms, the first Bush killed the legislation by pocket veto, ostensibly because Congress had sought to include the many activities carried out by the CIA in conjunction with other countries.

Clinton and Bush

The existing informal system remained in effect, although at some point the White House sought to allay congressional fears by promising that sensitive operations would be revealed to a "Gang of Four," consisting of the senior members of each political party who sat on the intelligence committees. A few years later, the Clinton administration failed to notify Congress of arms traffic to Bosnia, a case in which the CIA had had an ambiguous, shadowy role. The episode figured importantly in the collapse of the 1997 nomination of Anthony Lake, President Bill Clinton's national security advisor, as CIA director. Congressional frustration at manipulations of intelligence oversight there became manifest.

All of this was perfectly evident to George J. Tenet, who eventually emerged as the next CIA chieftain, bridging the Clinton and second Bush administrations. Tenet had been a staffer, then staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee during the struggles over refining the notification system, and National Security Council staff director for intelligence during the fight over the Lake nomination. Having worked both sides of the policy street in Washington, Tenet ought to have been supremely sensitive to this issue.

Instead, Director Tenet blew no whistles as President George W. Bush collaborated in a wholesale evasion of the oversight system. The effort to construe a variety of intelligence-gathering activities (not limited to the National Security Agency intercept program) as too sensitive for routine notification, the similar restriction of aspects of the manipulated Iraq intelligence, the games played with CIA interrogation programs, the agency's acceptance of a vice-presidential order to cut Congress out of another program — all of these happened on Tenet's watch. The only thing done with respect to informing Congress was to widen the circle of political responsibility with a "Gang of Eight," to include the party leaders in each house of Congress, in briefings whose comprehensiveness and veracity is in dispute today.

Agency defenders have advanced an assortment of reasons why all this is a tempest in a teapot. Connecting the dispute with Speaker Nancy Pelosi's recent dustup over whether she was accurately briefed on CIA interrogation programs is the most distracting argument. But casting this in political terms is misleading. The Pelosi brouhaha is anotherinstance of the executive branch playing fast and loose with oversight strictures.

Assassination Teams

The claim that a targeted assassination program using hit teams, during a war, is no different than killing people with missiles from Predator drones has a patina of plausibility but is fundamentally wrong. Leaving aside the (real) question of whether the Predator attacks are themselves legal — U.S. regulations have officially proscribed assassinations and there is a legal question over whether a state of war can exist with a non-state actor like al-Qaeda — a reliance on hit teams is automatically highly sensitive.

A comparison has been made to Israeli hit teams killing Palestinian terrorists after their attack on the 1972 Olympics in Munich. But defenders of this program err. The Mossad, which had full license to act and no prohibitions on murder, was nevertheless forced to call off this project after its team assassinated an innocent man in Norway. The technique is inherently problematical.

The CIA should have known better. During the Phoenix program in Vietnam, the U.S. government claimed that enemies were killed in combat and not murdered, that it was not a true assassination program but one for neutralization, that it had been carefully reviewed from a legal standpoint, and so forth. This controversy helped lead to the very congressional investigations that led to the present oversight system. The Bush administration resisted briefing this program precisely because it wanted to avoid raising those old ghosts.

The CIA argues that the hit team concept was not a "real" program because it was an on-again, off-again thing: deactivated in 2004, revived the following year, stood down again, and recently slated for a more active status. Nor was it an expensive program, since only $1 million was spent on it. But these arguments are specious. As far back as the 1960s, the U.S. government decided that any covert operation costing more than $25,000 required review under interagency procedures for approving these activities. An operation large enough to demand approval outside the CIA is significant enough to brief to Congress. Moreover — to bring the Pelosi controversy back into this — her claim that she was being briefed on concepts for interrogation at a minimum means that the CIA did brief programs that were not "real" on other occasions — during the very timeframe when this project is supposed to have been active. Again, the conclusion must be that the CIA did not brief the hit team concept in order to avoid raising the ghosts of Phoenix.

Time to Codify

There are two real questions lurking behind the smoke and mirrors. The first is that the CIA accepted an action order from the vice president, who is not in its chain of command. Under the conventionally understood system, the CIA works only for the president. A vice president has no authority to issue orders. If George W. Bush delegated that authority, he never told the American people. Such an act would certainly have been worthy of public comment.

The second is that the White House and executive authorities arrogated to themselves the right to decide which anticipated intelligence activities had to be revealed to Congress. As the late Senator Barry Goldwater, conservative Republican to a fault, famously declaimed at the time of the Iran-Contra affair, "This was no way to run a railroad."

Bush administration abuses and a CIA director's weakness demonstrate that intelligence oversight is too important to be left to individuals. It's time to codify requirements for congressional notification, putting back into law something that was briefly there decades ago. This should not be a matter of an executive order from President Barack Obama, though that could be a temporary measure pending the passage of legislation. Executive order restraints can be changed at the stroke of a pen. The United States needs a statute that puts in precise writing what intelligence activities the Congress must be informed of. That is the way to avoid travesties like the hit-team affair.

John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. His current book is Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975 (University of Kansas Press).

This article originally appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus.

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