Bastard Children of the Rand Corporation

NYT

Link to a Times review of the book: SOLDIERS OF REASON: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire, by Alex Abella (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $15.95.) “All of us are bastard children of RAND,” Abella writes in this comprehensive history, the think tank’s first. RAND helped shape nuclear strategy, health care (it developed the idea of deductibles and co-payments) and, through its championing of rational choice theory, the Reagan revolution and the current economic crisis. Not to mention the Vietnam War.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/books/review/PaperRow-t.html

Say what? "CHAMPIONS" OF "THE CURRENT ECONOMIC CRISIS" ...

American War Propaganda Top Ten

By Susan A Brewerhttp://blog.oup.com/2009/06/war-propaganda/
June 30, 2009

Susan A. Brewer is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Her new book, Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq, is a fascinating history of how successive presidents have conducted what Donald Rumsfeld called “perception management”. In the original post below she looks at the top ten American propaganda messages of the last century.

Propaganda sells wars. Emotionally powerful and instantly recognizable, propaganda messages serve to simplify complex international crises for public consumption. A persuasive blend of fact and fiction, they resonate with what Americans want to believe about themselves. Here are the top ten messages used by the U.S. government over the past century to rally public support for war.

10. WE FIGHT TO STOP ANOTHER HITLER. There was only one Hitler, but he lives on in wartime propaganda since World War II.

9. WE FIGHT OVER THERE SO WE DON’T HAVE TO FIGHT HERE. In this message, America typically is portrayed as a pastoral land of small towns, not as an urban, industrialized superpower.

8. WE FIGHT CLEAN WARS WITH SUPERIOR TECHNOLOGY. This message suggests that U.S. troops will not be in much danger, nor will innocent civilians be killed in what is projected to be a quick and decisive conflict.

7. WE FIGHT TO PROTECT WOMEN AND CHILDREN. A traditional theme of war propaganda since ancient times, it is accompanied by compelling visuals and heartrending stories.

6. WE FIGHT BRUTISH, FANATICAL ENEMIES. Another classic, it dehumanizes enemy fighters.

5. WE FIGHT TO UNITE THE NATION. Here war is shown to heal old wounds and unify the divisions caused by the Civil War, class conflict, racial and ethnic differences, or past failures such as the Vietnam War.

4. WE FIGHT FOR THE FLAG AND THE REPUBLIC FOR WHICH IT STANDS. The trend has been to emphasize the flag over the republic. The more flags on display, the less likely the people’s elected representatives will debate foreign policy or exercise their power to declare war.

3. WE FIGHT TO LIBERATE THE OPPRESSED. When the oppressed resist U.S. help, they appear ungrateful and in need of American guidance especially if they have valuable resources.

2. WE FIGHT TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE. During the Philippine War, for example, this message advised that Uncle Sam knew what was best for the little brown brothers.

1. WE FIGHT TO PROTECT THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE. Although the American way of life stands for peace, it requires a lot of fighting.

G. Gordon Liddy - Portrait of a Terrorist and Convicted Felon

What a spokesman for "conservative principles" ...

" ... Liddy served four and a half years in prison in connection with his conviction for his role in the Watergate break-in and the break-in at the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Liddy has acknowledged preparing to kill someone during the Ellsberg break-in "if necessary"; plotting to kill journalist Jack Anderson; plotting with a "gangland figure" to kill Howard Hunt to stop him from cooperating with investigators; plotting to firebomb the Brookings Institution; and plotting to kidnap "leftist guerillas" at the 1972 Republican National Convention -- a plan he outlined to the Nixon administration using terminology borrowed from the Nazis. (The homicide, firebombing, and kidnapping plots were never carried out; the break-ins were.) During the 1990s, Liddy reportedly instructed his radio audience on multiple occasions on how to shoot Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents and also reportedly said he had named his shooting targets after Bill and Hillary Clinton. ... "

http://mediamatters.org/research/200907230054

Jon Stewart Walks in Cronkite's Footsteps

Jon Stewart: America's most trusted news anchor?
by Adam Markovitz
Jul 23, 2009

Jon Stewart has certainly come a long way from hosting Short Attention Span Theater: A Time Magazine online poll shows that 44 percent of Americans trust The Daily Show host over network hotshots Katie Couric, Charlie Gibson, and Brian Williams (the runner-up with 29 percent). ...


http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2009/07/jon-stewart-most-trusted-anchor.html

CIA Special Agent (Jackal) on Air America

Air America throws Rice at Limbaugh
http://www.rbr.com/radio/15948.html
2009-07-23

“Live from Washington with Jack Rice” is the new offering from Air America, airing in the noon-3:00 pm slot opposite Rush Limbaugh. It’s the time slot that for much of Air America’s existence was filled by now-US Sen. Al Franken (D-MN).

Rice is a former CIA Special Agent and Field Operations Officer, as well as a former prosecuting attorney and trial lawyer. More recently, he has been an award winning journalist and correspondent, who travels around the world to cover policy, politics, national and international affairs. He was nominated in 2007 for a Peabody Award for his work in Iraq. In addition to his radio work, Rice is a frequent contributor to “NBC Nightly News,” MSNBC and Fox News Channel.

The new show has recently featured such guests as “Vanity Fair’s” Todd Purdum (author of the Sarah Palin/”It Came From Wasilla” article), Rep. Jan Schakowsky (discussing the CIA’s decision to keep confidential information from the House Intelligence Committee), Congresswomen Allyson Schwartz (speaking about health care reform), and David Gaynes, documentary filmmaker of the upcoming film “Saving Hubble.”

The WPost’s David Ignatius Pens Another Exculpatory Brief for CIA

By Melvin A. Goodman
The Public Record
Jul 23rd, 2009

David Ignatius, the mainstream media’s leading apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency, has written another exculpatory brief for the CIA. In today’s Washington Post, Ignatius defends the CIA’s assassination program and implies that no investigation is needed since “nobody had been killed.”

A week ago, Ignatius argued that it was “just plain nuts” to have an investigation and that CIA operatives would refuse assignments in counterterrorism in the wake of any investigation. What Ignatius doesn’t do is discuss the legal and moral implications of a secret assassination program or the CIA’s tortured history in this field.

The CIA is no stranger to the field of assassination where they have contributed to numerous disasters. Revelations of assassination plots in Cuba, the Congo, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam in the early 1960–at the direction of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations–led to a ban on CIA political assassinations in the mid-1970s. None of these assassination attempts helped U.S. national security interests, and all of them led to increased violence, even terrorism.

An assassination plot against Patrice Lumumba in the Congo led to the emergence of Mobutu Sese Seku, the most evil tyrant in modern African history. CIA’s covert actions against the democratically elected Salvador Allende led to the emergence of Augusto Pinochet.

Ignatius discusses CIA training of a Lebanese assassination team after the 1983 bombings of the U.S. embassy and the Marine barracks, but fails to mention the team’s only operation. In 1985, the CIA-trained team set off a car bomb that killed 80 innocent people in Beirut and wounded 200. The devastation, fires, and collapsed buildings from the bomb killed, hurt, or terrorized anyone who happened to be in the immediate neighborhood.

The target of the bomb, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, escaped without injury, and his supporters placed a “Made in the USA” banner in front of a building that had been blown out. In that same year, despite the ban on political assassination, the CIA demonstrated its contempt for the ban and produced a manual for the Contras that discussed
"neutralizing" officials in Nicaragua.

Ignatius does not discuss the Phoenix operation in Vietnam, where the CIA ran a paramilitary campaign of arrest, interrogation, torture, and assassination that targeted many innocent victims. William Colby ran this program from 1968 to 1971 and, when he became CIA director in the mid-1970s, he decided to share sensitive intelligence on the assassination plots with the Church Commission because of his regrets over the Phoenix program.

Nor does Ignatius mention the CIA training of death squads in Central America, including Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. The CIA misled the congress about most of these actions, and we still lack complete information on CIA support for the repressive regime in Guatemala over a forty-year period. All of these activities raised serious questions about the judgment and objectivity of high-ranking CIA officials and demonstrated that these illegal covert activities are addictive to some operational officers.

It is noteworthy that Ignatius relies on his information from retired and active clandestine operatives who seem to have no difficulty in passing sensitive information, including operational code names, to a sympathetic journalist like Ignatius. Three years ago, however, an officer in the Office of the Inspector General was fired and frog-marched out of CIA headquarters for having unauthorized conversations with journalists.

Her name was Mary McCarthy, and she accused senior Agency officials of lying to congress about detentions and interrogations, the very abuses that cause Ignatius no concern. CIA director Leon Panetta must understand that such a double standard exists at the CIA and he should wonder why it took him five months to learn about the secret assassination program. And perhaps he should make sure that a new statutory Inspector General is named at the CIA to replace the one who announced his retirement five months ago.

Even democracies must rely on secret intelligence for their survival, but the role of a secret intelligence agency in a democracy will always be difficult and occasionally controversial. The CIA’s role in torture and abuse, secret prisons, and extraordinary renditions is an example of the illegal and immoral activity that can take place without proper leadership.

These activities must be investigated, and CIA director Panetta was certainly correct to report any assassination program to the congress, even one that had not conducted any assassinations. When the CIA oversteps its moral and legal boundaries, it must be stopped.

Just as illicit CIA actions during the Vietnam War and Iran-contra led to the introduction of reforms, the CIA’s unlawful activities in the wake of the Iraq War must be examined and never repeated. Unfortunately, Ignatius believes that such a period of discovery will weaken the CIA; it is more likely to strengthen the CIA. The creation of a congressional oversight process in the 1970s was an important reform; the creation of a statutory Inspector General in the 1980s was another.

Ignatius may be a Robert Ludlum wannabe, but he should realize that there are no Jason Bournes at the Central Intelligence Agency.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

http://pubrecord.org/commentary/2692/wposts-david-ignatius-another/

NEW YORKER: "What Did Seymour Hersh Say About Assassinations?"

HUNTER-KILLER TEAMS
www.newyorker.com

Excerpt:

... Let’s start with motive. In “What Went Wrong,” in the October 8, 2001, issue—on newsstands October 1, 2001, and reported as the dust was still settling at Ground Zero—a “C.I.A. man” spoke to Hersh about the need to consider tactics that “defy the American rule of law”:

“We need to do this—knock them down one by one,” he said. “Are we serious about getting rid of the problem—instead of sitting around making diversity quilts?”

Hersh picked up the story in “Manhunt,” in the December 23 & 30, 2002, issue. The piece began with the killing, by Hellfire missile, of an Al Qaeda leader named Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi. At the time, Bush Administration officials told reporters that Harethi was on a list of “ ‘high-value’ targets whose elimination, by capture or death, had been called for by President Bush.” A Yemeni official told Hersh that in the course of the operation

there had been two intelligence “mistakes” that almost resulted in targeting innocent Bedouins.

Hersh went on,

The al-Harethi operation also marked a dramatic escalation of the American war on terrorism. For more than a generation, state-endorsed assassination has been anathema in the United States. In 1975, after revelations of C.I.A. efforts in the nineteen-sixties to kill Fidel Castro and other hostile foreign leaders, a Senate committee led by Frank Church concluded that such plotting “violates moral precepts fundamental to our way of life.”… In 1976, President Gerald Ford signed an executive order banning political assassination, and that order remains in force.

In the aftermath of September 11th, however, the targeting and killing of individual Al Qaeda members without juridical process has come to be seen within the Bush Administration as justifiable military action in a new kind of war, involving international terrorist organizations and unstable states.

On July 22nd, [2002,] Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld issued a secret directive ordering Air Force General Charles Holland, the four-star commander of Special Operations, “to develop a plan to find and deal with members of terrorist organizations.” He added, “The objective is to capture terrorists for interrogation or, if necessary, to kill them, not simply to arrest them in a law-enforcement exercise.” The manhunt would be global in its reach, Rumsfeld wrote, and Holland was to cut through the Pentagon bureaucracy and process deployment orders “in minutes and hours, not days and weeks.”

Hersh wrote that many of those he spoke to in the military and the intelligence communities

have expressed alarm at the Pentagon policy about targeting Al Qaeda members. Their concerns have less to do with the legality of the program than with its wisdom, its ethics, and, ultimately, its efficacy.

Senior officers “argued that Rumsfeld’s plans would turn the military’s most élite forces … into hunter-killer teams”:

“They want to turn these guys into assassins,” a former high-level intelligence officer told me. “They want to go on rumors—not facts—and go for political effect, and that’s what the Special Forces Command is really afraid of. Rummy is saying that politics is bigger than war, and we need to take guys out for political effect: ‘You have to kill Goebbels to get to Hitler.’”

Later in the piece, Hersh writes:

In internal Defense Department memos, Rumsfeld and the civilian officials close to him laid out the case for a new approach to the war on terrorism, one that would rely, in part, on the killing of selected individuals.

In one such memo,

Rumsfeld was told, “We ‘over-plan’ for every contingency…. This denies us the agility and tactical surprise so necessary for manhunts, snatches, and retribution raids. We must be willing to accept the risks associated with a smaller footprint.” The paper urged the Secretary to “ensure that the military leadership understands fully the cultural change you seek.” The manhunting teams must be kept “small and agile,” the paper noted, and “must be able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to travel and to enter countries surreptitiously.”

What did this mean? A Pentagon consultant told Hersh:

“We’ve created a culture in the Special Forces—twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds who need adult leadership. They’re assuming you’ve got legal authority, and they’ll do it”—eagerly eliminate any target assigned to them. Eventually, the intelligence will be bad, he said, and innocent people will be killed. “And then they’ll get hung.”

“PREËMPTIVE MANHUNTING”

A year later, in “Moving Targets” (December 15, 2003), Hersh wrote about assassination as a tactic in Iraq, where what had looked like a quick victory by American forces was beginning to look much murkier:

A new Special Forces group, designated Task Force 121, has been assembled from Army Delta Force members, Navy SEALs, and C.I.A. paramilitary operatives, with many additional personnel ordered to report by January. Its highest priority is the neutralization of the Baathist insurgents, by capture or assassination. The revitalized Special Forces mission is a policy victory for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has struggled for two years to get the military leadership to accept the strategy of what he calls “Manhunts”…

But many of the officials I spoke to were skeptical of the Administration’s plans. Many of them fear that the proposed operation—called “preëmptive manhunting” by one Pentagon adviser—has the potential to turn into another Phoenix Program. Phoenix was the code name for a counter-insurgency program that the U.S. adopted during the Vietnam War, in which Special Forces teams were sent out to capture or assassinate Vietnamese believed to be working with or sympathetic to the Vietcong …

[A] former Special Forces official warned that the problem with head-hunting is that you have to be sure “you’re hunting the right heads.” ...

FULL STORY: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/07/close-read-seymour-hersh-assassinations.html