How to Create a WIA—Worthless Intelligence Agency
By Chalmers Johnson
TomDispatch.com
Tuesday 23 November 2004

Two weeks after George Bush’s reelection, Porter J. Goss, the newly appointed Director of Central Intelligence, wrote an internal memorandum to all employees of his agency telling them, “[Our job is to] support the administration and its policies in our work. As agency employees, we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies."[1] Translated from bureaucrat-speak, this directive says, “You now work for the Republican Party. The intelligence you produce must first and foremost protect the President from being held accountable for the delusions he has concerning Iraq, Osama bin Laden, preventive war, torturing captives, democracy growing from the barrel of a gun, and the ‘war on terror.’"

  This approach is not new, even though former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman declares that “the current situation is the worst intelligence scandal in the nation’s history."[2] Back in 1973, when James Schlesinger briefly succeeded Richard Helms as CIA director, he proclaimed on arrival at the agency’s Virginia “campus”: “I am here to see that you guys don’t screw Richard Nixon."[3] Schlesinger underscored his point by saying that he would be reporting directly to White House political adviser Bob Haldeman and not to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. In the contemporary White House, Goss need not bother going directly to Karl Rove since Bush’s outgoing and incoming National Security Advisers, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, have both been working for months under Rove’s direction primarily to reelect the President.

  In 1973, Schlesinger wanted to protect Nixon from revelations that the CIA had broken into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and illegally infiltrated the antiwar movement within the United States. His actual achievement was to perpetuate Washington’s idée fixe that the United States could still win the Vietnam War despite overwhelming intelligence to the contrary. The same is likely to be true today and the outcome is likely to be similar. Just as thirty years ago, an administration refused to pay attention to its own internal intelligence assessments and lost the Vietnam War, so another administration has again wrapped itself in a fantasy bubble of wishful thinking and so is losing the war it started in Iraq.

  Intelligence and the Truth-teller

  Part of the background to the Goss memo is a widespread misunderstanding of why the CIA was created and what it actually does. For example, Bush apostle David Brooks writes in the New York Times that the CIA is engaged “in slow-motion brazen insubordination, which violate[s] all standards of honorable public service. . . . It is time to reassert some harsh authority so CIA employees know they must defer to the people who win elections. . . . If they [people in the CIA] ever want their information to be trusted, they can’t break the law with self-serving leaks of classified data."[4] Brooks seems to think that the CIA is the President’s personal advertising agency and that its employees owe their livelihoods to him. About Michael Scheuer, the head of the “bin Laden Unit” in the agency’s Counterterrorism Center from 1996 to 1999 and the anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, Brooks fumes, “Here was an official on the president’s payroll publicly campaigning against his boss.”

  Leave aside the fact that the President doesn’t pay any government official’s salary, at least not legally, and that Scheuer was more interested in educating the public about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, on which he is an authority, than in covering up the President’s mistakes; the point is that the issue of the CIA’s intelligence on the Iraq war is bringing back into our political life once again the figure most feared by presidents: the truth-teller. During a previous period of falsified intelligence, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger said in the Oval Office in front of President Nixon and his Special Counsel Charles Colson, “Daniel Ellsberg is the most dangerous man in America. He must be stopped at all costs."[5] Kissinger and Nixon subsequently ordered up felonies, such as a break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, in order to try to smear and discredit the man who had revealed to the public the systematic lying of three presidents—Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson—about the war in Vietnam.

  Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had ordered a special staff to write a top secret History of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68, known as “The Pentagon Papers,” of which Ellsberg was responsible for the 1961 volume on John F. Kennedy’s presidency. Ellsberg’s release of the highly classified Pentagon Papers to the New York Times resulted in the public exposure of virtually every National Intelligence Estimate on Vietnam written by the CIA since the end of French colonial rule. Bush’s attempt to squelch information from the CIA then is hardly unprecedented in the annals of our government, but it is egregious and ultimately self-defeating.

  The term “intelligence” has always rested uneasily in the name of the Central Intelligence Agency. There is no question that the agency was created in 1947 on the orders of President Truman for the sole purpose of collecting, evaluating, and coordinating—through espionage and from the public record—information related to the national security of the United States. Truman was concerned to prevent another surprise attack on the U.S. like Pearl Harbor and to ensure that all information available to the government was compiled and presented to him in a timely and usable form. The National Security Act of 1947 placed the CIA under the explicit direction of the National Security Council (NSC), the president’s chief staff unit for making decisions about war and peace, and gave it five functions. Four of them concern the collection, coordination, and dissemination of intelligence. It is the fifth—which allows the CIA to “perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct”—that has turned the CIA into a personal, secret, unaccountable army any president can order into battle without first having to ask Congress to declare war, as the Constitution requires.

  Clandestine operations, although nowhere mentioned in the CIA’s enabling statutes, quickly became the Agency’s main activity and as one of its most impartial Congressional analysts, Loch K. Johnson, has put the matter, “The covert action shop had become a place for rapid promotion within the agency."[6] The Directorate of Operations (DO) soon absorbed two-thirds of the CIA’s budget and personnel, while the Directorate of Intelligence limped along writing National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs)—summaries of intelligence produced by all the various intelligence agencies, including those in the Department of Defense—for the White House.

  Meanwhile, CIA covert operations subverted domestic journalism, planted false information in foreign newspapers, and covertly fed large amounts of money to members of the Christian Democratic Party in Italy, to King Hussein of Jordan, and to clients in Greece, West Germany, Egypt, Sudan, Suriname, Mauritius, the Philippines, Iran, Ecuador, and Chile. Clandestine agents devoted themselves to such tasks as depressing the global prices of agricultural products in order to damage uncooperative Third World countries, and sponsoring guerrilla wars or miscellaneous insurgencies in places as diverse as the Ukraine, Poland, Albania, Hungary, Indonesia, China, Tibet, Oman, Malaysia, Iraq, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, North Korea, Bolivia, Thailand, Haiti, Guatemala, Cuba, Greece, Turkey, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua, to name only a few of those on the public record. All this was justified by the Cold War, and no one beyond a very small group inside the government knew anything about it. The Central Intelligence Act of 1949 modified the National Security Act of 1947 with a series of amendments that, in the words of that pioneer scholar of the CIA Harry Howe Ransom, “were introduced to permit [the CIA] a secrecy so absolute that accountability might be impossible."[7]

How to Misuse Intelligence

Regardless of what it most enjoys doing, the CIA is still tasked with providing the president with accurate information to enable him to avoid a surprise attack and protect the national security. In the foyer of the CIA’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia, is inscribed a Biblical quotation: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). Loch Johnson conjectures that former Director of the CIA (DCI) Allen Dulles probably thought it meant, “And ye shall know the truth—if ye be me, or the president.” Former DCI Richard Helms once maintained to Bob Woodward that the early warning function of the CIA “is everything, and underline everything."[8] Even if true, the CIA’s power to provide such unrequested information to a president constitutes a potential restraint on his freedom of action and may on occasion totally derail his policies, particularly since such intelligence is very rarely certain or unambiguous. Over the years the powers of the DCI to compel a president to read an intelligence estimate have been systematically diluted, and when information supplied to the president about a possible attack or any other matter under the CIA’s imprimatur has been leaked to the public, both the Agency and the intelligence have become politically radioactive.

Such revelations have usually taken one of two forms. In the first instance, the president, it is argued, has been shielded from or has refused to read accurate intelligence. In the second instance, the president is accused of secretly ordering the suppression of intelligence or of fabricating intelligence to support his preferred policies. President Bush has engaged in both forms of dishonesty, but he is certainly not the first president to do so. The examples are legion.

In 1961, at the time of the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, Richard Bissell, then head of the Directorate of Operations, gained the ear of President Kennedy and assured him that elated Cubans would welcome American-supported insurgents, strew rose petals in their path, and help overthrow the Castro government. Bissell simply did not show Kennedy the estimates that said Castro had extensive popular support and the invasion would fail.

Similarly, in May 1970, as President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger plotted their “incursion” into Cambodia, the Board of National Estimates (BNE) concluded that “an American invasion of Cambodia would fail to deter North Vietnamese continuation of the war."[9] DCI Helms failed to deliver this estimate to the White House, knowing what the BNE did not—that the decision to invade had already been made. Former DCI Robert M. Gates generalizes: “It has been my experience over the years that the usual response of a policymaker to intelligence with which he disagrees or which he finds unpalatable is to ignore it."[10]

Examples of the distortion or fabrication of intelligence are rarer, but they do occur. During the Vietnam War, Gen. William Westmoreland, U.S. military commander from 1964 to 1968, omitted from his estimate of enemy forces all Communist guerrillas and informal local defense forces—perhaps as many as 120,000-150,000 fighters—that another estimate indicated had been responsible for up to 40% of American losses. His apparent intent was to make victory in Vietnam look more plausible to the American public. On March 14, 1967, DCI Helms included Westmoreland’s figures in an NIE going to the White House even though he “knew that the figures on enemy troop strength in Vietnam provided by military intelligence were wrong—or, at any rate, quite different from CIA figures. Yet he signed the estimate without dissent. The apparent reason, according to his biographer, was that ‘he did not want a fight with the military, supported by [National Security Adviser Walt] Rostow at the White House.’"[11]

Another example of the suppression or distortion of intelligence occurred in 1969-70 over the issue of whether or not the Soviet SS-9 ICBM could carry three warheads and whether those warheads could be fired at separate and distinct targets—that is, whether or not the SS-9 carried MIRVs (multiple independently-targetable re-entry vehicles). If true, this would perhaps have given the Soviet Union a first-strike capability against the United States. The SS-9 came in four models, the first of which had its flight test on September 23, 1963, and began to be deployed in the summer of 1967. All Western intelligence agencies agreed that models one through three carried a single warhead, some with huge yields (in the range of 18 megatons). Disagreement arose over model four, which seemed to carry three warheads. Whether these were independently targetable was in dispute.

National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird contended that the fourth version of the SS-9 was a MIRVed weapon; the CIA in its NIE on the subject said that it was not. At first the CIA rejected the pressure coming from the policymakers and, in fact, added more evidence against MIRVs to its estimate. Ultimately, however, DCI Helms removed the paragraph arguing against Soviet preparations for a first strike after “an assistant to [Laird] informed Helms that the statement contradicted the public position of the Secretary."[12] As it turned out, the CIA was right. The SS-9s were armed with MRVs, not MIRVs—that is, they could produce only a cluster of explosions in a single area. The Soviet Union did not deploy MIRVs until 1976, six years after the United States had done so. [13] So it was we, not they, who accelerated the race toward mutual assured destruction—and did so on the basis of fake intelligence.

When it comes to ignoring accurate CIA intelligence, the preeminent example in the Bush administration was National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice’s indifference to al-Qaeda and her failure to ensure that the president read and understood the explicit warnings of an imminent surprise attack that the agency delivered to her. As the Washington Post’s Steve Coll has summarized the matter in his book Ghost Wars, “BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN U.S. was the headline on the President’s Daily Brief presented to Bush at his Crawford, Texas, ranch on August 6 [2001]. The report included the possibility that bin Laden operatives would seek to hijack airplanes. The hijacking threat, mentioned twice, was one of several possibilities outlined. There was no specific information about when or where such an attack might occur."[14]

Slaying the Messenger

After the extent of its failure became known, and under extreme pressure from the public and families of the victims of 9/11, the Bush administration reluctantly authorized the creation of a National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States and permitted National Security Adviser Rice to testify before it in public. But the fix was in: The Commission was to concentrate on “intelligence failures,” not on the failure of policymakers to heed the intelligence, and on the need to “reform” the CIA but not to such an extent as to damage the president’s ability to blame it for his mistakes.

On November 20, 2004, right-wing members of the House of Representatives scuttled the major recommendation of the 9/11 Commission—namely, to provide the leader of the American intelligence community with greater authority to direct and coordinate the analyses of all 15 intelligence agencies. Reflecting the Pentagon’s interests in maintaining control over 80% of the $40 billion annual intelligence budget, Duncan Hunter (R-CA), Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and an ally of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, withdrew his support. Other Republican congressmen joined him, demanding that the bill go even further than was already the case in harassing so-called illegal immigrants, primarily from Mexico.

The President and the Speaker of the House both said they favored enactment of the proposed legislation, but many experienced observers thought it was all Grand Kabuki by the Republican Party, intended to make it appear that the White House favored reform while ensuring that reform did not actually occur. In killing the reform bill, the Pentagon unambiguously displayed the raw political power of the military-industrial-congressional complex. During October 2004, Gen. Richard B. Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, without the public approval of any civilian leader of the Defense Department, wrote to Congressman Hunter expressing his support for sabotaging change.

After the 9/11 attacks and the Bush administration’s decision to go to war with Iraq, the focus shifted from ignoring unwanted intelligence to actively creating false intelligence. The critical item was the NIE of October 1, 2002, entitled “Iraq’s Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction,” which became known inside the CIA as the “whore of Babylon."[15] It explicitly endorsed Vice President Cheney’s contention of August 26, 2002—“We know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons”—and was signed by DCI George Tenet with “high confidence.” “The intelligence process,” writes CIA veteran Ray McGovern, “was not the only thing undermined. So was the Constitution. Various drafts of the NIE, reinforced with heavy doses of ‘mushroom-cloud’ rhetoric, were used to deceive congressmen and senators into ceding to the executive their prerogative to declare war—the all-important prerogative that the framers of the Constitution took great care to reserve exclusively to our elected representatives in Congress.”

In succeeding months numerous review commissions revealed that the October NIE was only one of numerous failures by the truth-tellers to do what the people of the United States pay them to do. The Senate Intelligence Committee, the 9/11 Commission, and the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group under Charles Duelfer all reported that the CIA’s so-called intelligence on Iraqi WMD was fictitious. Even more dangerously for the White House, these reports suggested that its so-called war on terrorism and its attack on Iraq rather than on the true perpetrators of 9/11 were based on false intelligence, much of it manufactured in the Pentagon.

The number three civilian defense official in the Pentagon, Douglas Feith, had set up the Office of Special Plans, an operation devoted to going through all the raw intelligence available to the various spy agencies and finding items that offered possible evidence of (or hints of evidence of) links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. It was this effort to get around both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, neither of which had found links or ties between Iraq and 9/11, that eventually led some officials to break ranks and charge that the war against Iraq was in fact undercutting the “war on terrorism”—specifically, Richard A. Clark, the White House’s coordinator for counterterrorism in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, in his book Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terrorism; and the CIA’s Michael Scheuer in Imperial Hubris and in his letter to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees entitled “How Not to Catch a Terrorist"[16]

The new head of the CIA, Porter Goss, is now setting about knocking off all such messengers and their supporters still inside the CIA because the agency, despite its frequent co-option and misuse by presidents, still retains a vestigial role as a truth-teller. Goss had been ordered to make it appear that the agency misled the President (rather than the other way round, as actually happened). He is then supposed to shake up what he calls a “dysfunctional” organization. After George Tenet resigned as DCI in July 2004 and went on the lecture circuit at $35,000 a pop—he had earned well over a half-million dollars by November—Bush appointed Goss to control further truth-telling at Langley and to head off efforts by Congress to create a powerful intelligence czar, as the 9/11 Commission has recommended.[17] The Senate confirmed Goss by a vote of 77 to 17 (six senators did not vote), strongly suggesting the increasing worthlessness of Senate oversight of the executive branch.

Goss represented the 14th district of Florida for some sixteen years in the House of Representatives, but before that, between 1962 and 1971, he worked in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (DO). He was stationed primarily in Latin America, and rumors persist that he left the agency under a cloud. In 1995, he was appointed to the House’s Intelligence Oversight Committee and in 1997 became its chairman. There is no evidence that he did anything at all in this position, including investigating the intelligence lapses that preceded 9/11 or the failure of the CIA to have placed a single spy anywhere within Saddam Hussein’s regime. Admiral Stansfield Turner, DCI under President Carter, has said that Goss was the worst appointment ever made to the position of director of the CIA.

How to Create a Worthless Intelligence Agency

Goss is a highly political bureaucrat, who raised eyebrows when he gave speeches earlier this year attacking John Kerry for slashing intelligence funding without mentioning that, in 1995, he himself had co-sponsored a measure calling for firing 20% of all CIA personnel over five years. Goss has also dismissed the efforts to find out who in the Bush administration identified, and so outed, undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame—wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson who had embarrassed the administration over its Iraqi nuclear claims—to the press as “wild and unsubstantiated allegations,” a position that will not reassure operatives at the Directorate who can be and have been assassinated because of such leaks. Goss brought with him to Langley a group of Republican Party activist staff members from the House Intelligence Committee and set them up in prominent executive positions from which they unleashed a witch-hunt against any and all intelligence officers who sought to put accuracy and integrity ahead of service to George W. Bush.

It is interesting that Goss has begun his shake-up of the CIA by forcing out the director and deputy director of operations, even though this is not where the alleged failures of the CIA in recent years occurred. (This, in turn, has lead to speculation that he is trying to ensure his own service record in the DO will be kept under wraps.) Within the coming weeks, he will certainly fire Jami A. Miscik, head of the Directorate of Intelligence (DI), who has worked in the agency since 1983 and was a close associate of former DCI George J. Tenet. She has led the DI since May 2002, a period in which much of the false reporting on Iraq occurred. It may be logical and expectable that Miscik be held responsible for the politicized intelligence produced on her watch; but under the present circumstances it is clear that she is actually being punished for following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, who ordered up the false intelligence in the first place. As Spencer Ackerman has written, “If Goss thought the CIA was dysfunctional before, he has guaranteed that it is now."[18]

There is every reason to try to make the CIA at least slightly more effective in its truth-telling mission, but even the hint that a Republican Party loyalty test is now being applied will cause an exodus of experienced analysts and leave the country even more vulnerable than it is now. With several wars underway (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, Colombia, Kashmir, Sudan, and Chechnya, to name only the most obvious), Iran and North Korea on the cusp of becoming nuclear powers, a looming possibility of a global flight from the dollar, the emergence of China as an economic powerhouse, and the polar ice caps melting, this is not exactly a good time to be blinding ourselves. The only groups who will profit from a crippling of what is left of the CIA’s early warning and analytic capabilities will be the Bush-Cheney White House and Rumsfeld’s Pentagon.

The present sorry chapter in the rise and fall of the CIA reflects trends in the U.S. that are bolstering an “imperial presidency” and its handmaiden, militarism. Although the CIA was created to help inform presidents about threats to the country, it is clear that the President and his top officials no longer want or need its intelligence functions, which have, in any case, been increasingly transferred to the military establishment, the professional armed forces, and the military-industrial complex—groups hardly best known for their reputations as truth-tellers.

It is true that the CIA, once founded, quickly evolved into a Praetorian Guard, totally under the president’s secret control, and that every president since Truman, upon discovering such an extraordinary source of power privately available, has found its use irresistible. Over the decades, however, the CIA’s ability to intervene covertly and often violently in the affairs of others almost anywhere on Earth has become somewhat less interesting to presidents as Congress passed laws constraining presidential independence of action when it came to the Agency—and as alternatives came into being in the form of the military’s various Special Forces. The president now has an explicit and far more military Praetorian Guard at his disposal that lacks any form of democratic oversight, although he risks a future moment in which it might eventually take power into its own hands, as the original Praetorians of the Roman Empire did two millennia ago.

Many presidents have abused their secret powers. When these violations of law became public, as they did spectacularly during the Watergate scandal, they led to Congressional efforts to impose oversight on the agency. From 1947 to 1974, Congress was completely uninformed about and exercised no control at all over anything the CIA did. The agency’s budget was buried in the “black” sections of the Pentagon’s budget. With the amending of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974 (the “Hughes-Ryan Act") and the 1980 Intelligence Oversight Act, the president was required formally to authorize all operations in writing and report them to special committees of Congress or at least to their chairmen and ranking minority members.

None of these measures has worked well, but they reflected a growing public distrust of secret powers. Some members of Congress even collaborated with unscrupulous CIA officials to subvert controls over expenditures and covert operations. When Congressman Charlie Wilson (D-TX) became chairman of the House’s Intelligence Oversight Committee, he wrote to his friends at the CIA, who were then secretly enlarging the supply of weapons to the mujahideen in Afghanistan, “Well, gentlemen, the fox is in the hen house. Do whatever you like."[19] Similarly, in 1985, the oversight system virtually collapsed when it was revealed that NSA director Vice Adm. John Poindexter and his aide Lt. Col. Oliver L. North had secretly collaborated with DCI William Casey to sell arms to Iran and that no one in Congress had been informed about it in any way. Somewhat more rigorous Congressional scrutiny of the CIA ensued, which had the unintended effect of making CIA officers more risk averse while enlarging the powers of the Pentagon and our 14 other supersecret intelligence agencies, particularly the National Security Agency, whose budget the Pentagon controls.

Nonetheless, the CIA still retains its statutory role of compiling and transmitting to the president objective intelligence on matters it deems relevant to the nation’s security. The Agency may have become little more than a speed-bump for an imperial president who also dominates the Congress and the courts, but it is still part of the checks and balances of power within the executive branch of our government that make the U.S. a democratic republic and protect us from an imperial usurpation of power. With the reelection of President Bush and the appointment of Porter Goss to bring the CIA under White House control, it becomes increasingly hard to see how the republic will survive.

  -------
  Footnotes

1. Douglas Jehl, “Chief of CIA Tells His Staff to Back Bush,” the New York Times, November 17, 2004.

2. Melvin A. Goodman, “Righting the CIA,” the Baltimore Sun, November 19, 2004.

3. See, among several references, the remarks of a CIA officer who actually heard Schlesinger: Ray McGovern, “Cheney’s Cat’s Paw: Porter Goss as CIA Director,” Counterpunch, July 6, 2004.

4. David Brooks, “The C.I.A. Versus Bush,” the New York Times, November 13, 2004.

5. Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets [New York: Viking, 2002], p. 434.

6. Loch K. Johnson, America’s Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989], p. 21.

7. Loch K. Johnson, p. 36.

8. Bob Woodward, Veil: The CIA’s Secret Wars, 1981-87 [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987], p. 49.

9. Robert M. Gates, “The CIA and American Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs vol. 66, Winter 1987-88, p. 227.

10. Loch K. Johnson, p. 62.

11. L. K. Johnson, p. 62; see also Harold P. Ford, CIA and Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes, 1962-1968 [Washington: Central Intelligence Agency, 1998], pp. 86-104.

12. 94th Congress, 2nd Session, Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities [the Church committee], Final Report [Washington: Government Printing Office, 1976], vol. 1, p. 78.

13. See Federation of American Scientists, Weapons of Mass Destruction, R-36/SS-9 SCARP; and Fred Kaplan, The Rumsfeld Intelligence Agency, Slate, October 28, 2002.

14. Steven Coll, Ghost Wars [New York: Penguin, 2004], p. 562.

15. Ray McGovern, “Cheney’s Cat’s Paw,” Counterpunch, July 6, 2004.

16. Richard A. Clark, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terrorism [New York: Free Press, 2004]; Michael Scheuer, “How Not to Catch a Terrorist,” Atlantic Monthly, December 2004, pp. 50-52.

17. Douglas Jehl, “Ex-CIA Chief Nets $500,000 on Talk Circuit,” the New York Times, November 11, 2004.

18. Spencer Ackerman, “Killing the Messenger,” Salon, November 16, 2004.

19. George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War [New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003], p. 494.

  -------

Chalmers Johnson’s latest books Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Metropolitan, 2000) and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (Metropolitan, 2004) are the first two volumes in a trilogy on American imperial policies. The final volume is now being written. Between 1967 and 1973 Johnson served as a consultant to the CIA’s Office of National Estimates.

<< Heel!

It seems the Sandinista Front recently won 87 of 152 mayoral contests, paving the way to a possible bid by Daniel Ortega for the presidency in 2006. With alarm bells sounding all the way to the oval office, the U.S. Department of State even dispatched Dan Fisk, one of it’s top Latin American specialists (and resident Cuba-hater), to meet with right wing leaders in that country to find a solution. (Now let’s see, we could build a few secret airstrips, get Ollie North to...Nah!)

Fisk, it’s worth noting, was raised in the shadow of the Heritage Foundation, the sanctuary of the U.S. extreme right wing whose founders did not attempt to conceal their extremist sympathies. A faithful disciple of Cuban-Austrian-U.S. Otto Reich (decribed as ‘The right hand of Bush’s dirty war in Latin America, his plenipotentiary ambassador for the hemisphere.’, he fraternized with individuals such as Jesse Helms, Elliot Abrams, Rogelio Pardo-Maurer, Frank Calzón, Jane Kirkpatrick and other old figures of the fascistic Washington fauna. In addition to uttering the inane and thoughtless quote about how Cuban-American’s need to calculate when their Cuban living relatives will die since they’ll only be allowed to visit Cuba once every three years in light of the new travel ban, he’s also defended human rights abuses during seminars held at the Fort Benning Military Institute (formerly known as the U.S. Army School of the Americas). Time will tell what their “solution” will be.

Speaking of Central America, with the increased “privatization” of the Iraq War, private security firms (mercenaries to you and me) have begun setting up recruitment centers south of the border. While Donald Rumsfeld is denying knowledge of any recruitment drives in Latin America (lest we think the coalition of the willing is crumbling faster than a snowman in Fallujah), companies like Illinois-based Triple Canopy (who, by the way, have a contract with the U.S. Department of State) have set up new digs in El Salvador, a country just coming out of a prolonged civil war. According to the Salvadoran daily, El Diario de Hoy, the Triple Canopy recruiter in San Salvador is offering applicants $1,700 a month for site guards, and $100 a day for bodyguards, cigarettes included. With private contractors suffering the second highest casualty rate of all “coalition members” in Iraq (only the U.S. military’s death toll is higher), the reduced life expectancy with a two pack-a-day habit will be negligible.

<< Heel!

University of Pennsylvania
Center for Organizational Dynamics

The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepency: Part I (pdf)

Steven F. Freeman, PhD
stfreema@sas.upenn.edu

Most Americans who had listened to radio or surfed the Internet on Election Day this year, sat down to watch election night coverage expecting that John Kerry had been elected President. Exit polls showed him ahead in nearly every battleground state, in many cases by sizable margins.  Although pre-election day polls indicated the race dead even or Bush slightly ahead, two factors seemed to explain Kerry’s edge: turnout was extraordinary high, which is generally good for Democrats, and as in every US Presidential election with an incumbent over the past quartercentury, undecided voters broke heavily toward the challenger.

But then, in key state after key state, counts showed very different numbers than the polls predicted; and the differentials were all in the same direction… [I]n every one, the shift favors Bush…

Part of the reason the issue went away for the media – and has become fodder for conspiracy theorists on the web – is secrecy and confusion about the data and what exactly is being characterized as the exit poll. If you go to the CNN website or any other website on which 2004 exit poll data is available, you’ll see numbers very different from those that were released on Election Day. That’s because the survey results originally collected and presented to subscribers were subsequently “corrected” to conform to official tallies.

The pollsters explain this as a natural process: the “uncalibrated” data were preliminary; once the counts come in, they recalibrate their original data on the assumptions that the count is correct, and that any discrepancies must have been due to imbalanced representation in their samples or some other polling error. The pollsters have taken great pains to argue that their polls were not designed to verify election results, but rather to provide election coverage support to subscribers: as one piece of data (among many) that networks could use to “call” states and to explain voting patterns, i.e., who voted for whom, and why people voted as they did.

Whatever the merits of calibrating exit poll data, it confuses the issue of why the (uncalibrated) polls were so far off and why in the same direction. Although this calibration process may seem perfectly natural to NEP, it confuses nearly everyone else, even sophisticated analysts intimately involved in voting issues. The MIT-Caltech Voting Project, for example, issued a report concluding that exit poll data were consistent with state tallies and that there were no discrepancies based on voting method, including electronic voting systems. But they used this adjusted data to exonerate the process! In other words, they used data in which the count is assumed correct to prove that the count is correct. And, sadly, this report is being used to dismiss allegations that anything might be awry.

It’s an awful mistake, but it is understandable how they could make it. Few of us realized that this data is corrected. Neither the CNN website, nor any other site of which I’m aware, gives any indication that the data were anything other than what nearly all of us imagine exit poll data to be – data based (solely) on subjects surveyed leaving the polling place…

For this report, I use data that apparently are based solely on subjects surveyed leaving the polling place. These data were reportedly not meant to be released directly to the public,10 and were reportedly available to late evening Election Night viewers only because a computer glitch prevented NEP from making updates sometime around 8:30 p.m. that night.11 They were collected by Jonathon Simon, a former political survey research analyst, and are corroborated by saved screen shots [of the CNN website]… I happened to have ten exit poll internet pages stored in my computer memory, and in each case, his figures are identical to mine. The numbers are also roughly consistent with those released elsewhere…

Ruy Teixeira and others have rejected these data as unweighted, meaning that they have not been adjusted to appropriately weight demographic groups pollsters knowingly under- or oversampled, but that would seem very unlikely. NEP’s predecessor, Voter News Service, warns in bold letters in its 2000 Methodology statement never to use unweighted data… It makes no sense ever to distribute unweighted data to anyone. Pollsters want to get it right. Their customers are depending on it…

I’d rather have NEP data, but no one is going to see those until well into 2005 (if then). That said, I believe this CNN data are good, and can be used to generate some highly suggestive findings…
In general, we have reason to believe that exit polls, by which I mean uncorrected exit polls, are reasonably accurate survey instruments. Exit polls are surveys taken of representative respondents from the overall voting population. Both the logic behind them and experience suggest that these surveys should be able to predict overall results within statistical limits. It’s relatively easy to get a representative sample, and there is no problem with figuring out who is actually going to vote or how they will vote…

[P]redictions in this year’s contests were quite accurate. In the Utah presidential vote, for example, they predicted Bush 70.8%, Kerry 26.5%. The actual was Bush 71.1%, Kerry 26.4%. Consistently accurate exit poll predictions from student volunteers, including in this presidential election, suggest we should expect accuracy, within statistical limits, from the world’s most professional exit polling enterprise.

Exit polls have been widely used to verify elections. When Mexico sought legitimacy as a modernizing democracy in 1994, Carlos Salinas instituted reforms designed to ensure fair elections, and central among these were exit polls. Exit pollsters were hired again for the next Presidential election in 2000, and, not coincidentally, it was the first loss for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in its 72 year history.

In Russia, and throughout the former Soviet block, exit polls have been used to verify elections. Last fall, international foundations sponsored an exit poll in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia during a parliamentary election. On Election Day, the pollsters projected a victory for the main opposition party. When the sitting government announced that its own slate of candidates had won, supporters of the opposition stormed the Parliament, and the president, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, resigned under pressure from the United States and Russia…

The conventional wisdom going into the election was that three critical states would likely determine who would win the Presidential election—Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida…
The conventional wisdom proved correct. Bush won two of the three and ascended to electoral victory by virtue of that. In each of these states, however, exit polls differed considerably from recorded tallies…

Assuming independent state polls with no systematic bias, the odds against any two of these statistical anomalies occurring together is between 5,000:1 and 10,000:1. (20-40 times more improbable than ten straight heads from a fair coin) The odds against all three occurring together are 662,000-to-one. As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.

<< Heel!

The CIA’s Robert Baer describes Bush as a man who “…didn’t have a passport until he became president.… How in god’s name can he know anything about foreign policy or foreign countries? He didn’t visit any foreign countries! He knows Texas, he knows Maine… and then he has these people…”

The entire cast of those “people” are present and fully unaccountable: Dick and Lynn Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, etc. Indeed, even the “Prince of Darkness” Richard Perle makes an appearance from his villa in—get this—the South of France.

Highlights? I did enjoy Ed MCateer of the Christian Coalition calling Bush a hypocrite for putting Dick Cheney on the ticket and then allowing “that lesbian girl” (Mary Cheney) to be paraded around the 2000 convention. And the footage of General Boykin speaking to a large group of Christian evangelicals is precious. Boykin declares to the audience that a dark apparition in a photo taken in Mogadishu during the “Black Hawk Down” episode is “a demonic spirit.” What it actually was was a US aircraft. Boykin is now in charge of intelligence at the Pentagon.

One particularly delicious moment occurs when the scabrous Frank Carlucci (ex-CIA and now Chairman Emeritus at the Carlyle Group) makes an appearance, dripping with venom as he describes how, indeed, he was chairing a meeting attended by Osama bin Laden’s brother as the planes hit the WTC on September 11th. Note to Carlyle Group: Don’t ever let this man appear on camera again.

And then we have Christian evangelicals greeting Arial Sharon of Israel as though he were the second coming of Christ. There is more than just a little irony, for according to the “End Times” theology of many evangelicals, Jews will either have to convert to Christianity or be killed. With friends like these…

The World According to Bush mines much of the same turf as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. But unlike Moore, Karel is willing to allow his subjects to hang themsevles with their own words (sans editorial laugh track). That makes The World According to Bush particularly powerful. Many thanks to Dogskinreporter OG for bringing this one to my attention.

<< Heel!

University Researchers Challenge Bush Win In Florida

‘Something went awry with electronic voting in Florida,’ says the lead researcher

News Story by Dan Verton

NOVEMBER 18, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, said today that they have uncovered statistical irregularities associated with electronic voting machines in three Florida counties that may have given President George W. Bush 130,000 or more excess votes. The researchers are now calling on state and federal authorities to look into the problems.

The study, “The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections,” was conducted by doctoral students and faculty from the university’s sociology department and led by sociology professor Michael Hout.

Hout is an expert on statistical methods at the Berkeley Survey Research Center and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to the study, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for Bush between 2000 and 2004 compared to counties with paper ballots or optical scan equipment. This change cannot be explained by differences between counties in income, number of voters, change in voter turnout, or size of the Hispanic/Latino population, said Hout.

In Broward County, for example, Bush appears to have received approximately 72,000 excess votes, Hout said, adding that the research team is 99.9% sure that these effects are not attributable to chance. The other two counties that experienced unexplained statistical discrepancies in the vote are Miami-Dade and Palm Beach. The three counties revealed the most significant irregularities and were the most heavily Democratic counties in the state. Smaller counties that showed strong support for Bush didn’t produce any statistical anomalies, Hout said.

“For the sake of all future elections involving e-voting systems, someone must investigate and explain the statistical anomaly we found in Florida,” Hout said at a news conference today.

The researchers said they used a widely accepted method of study known as Multiple-Regression Analysis. It is a statistical technique widely used in the social and physical sciences to distinguish the individual effects of many variables, which in this case included number of voters, median income, Hispanic population, change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004, support for President Bush in the 2000 election and support for Republican candidate Bob Dole in 1996.

“No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained,” said Hout. “The study shows that a county’s use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero—less than one in a thousand chances.”

Hout, who describes himself as a nontechnical statistical researcher who has long been a skeptic of the criticisms levied against electronic voting machines, said he’s “always taken a show-me approach to the theories of problems [with e-voting systems].” But when he saw the results of this study, “that’s when I converted from skeptic [to believer]. I have concluded that something went awry with electronic voting in Florida.”

The researchers also studied electronic voting results in Ohio, which Bush also won, but found no problems there, said Hout.

In an effort to explain what might account for the statistical irregularities related to counties that used touch-screen e-voting systems instead of optical scanning systems, Hout said there could be embedded software glitches or other potential hardware problems as were reported on election day in the press.

“We have no political ax to grind,” said Hout. “We’re interesting in leaving no vote behind.”

See the hard data on this study here

<< Heel!

The Big Fix 2004
How to Fix a Presidential Election
Pt. I: Convicted Felons, ‘Shadowy Financiers’ Own Companies Counting Votes

November 15 2004—Venice, FL
by Daniel Hopsicker

An investigation into the surprisingly-sordid history of America’s “election services industry” has revealed that executives and owners of the two largest companies, E S & S and Sequoia Pacific, have been convicted of bribery and suborning public officials in more than a dozen states.

And while a felony conviction may be enough to prevent you from voting in Florida, convicted felons can take heart in the fact that the “blemish” on their record in no way disqualifies them from owning companies counting the votes.

In fact, the word ‘coverup’ itself was invented to describe the activities of the original owner of Sequoia Pacific, “shadowy financier” Lewis Wolfson, who got caught bribing no less a personage than a Supreme Court Justice of the United States of America.

While Abe Fortas was forced to resign in disgrace, no such harsh fate befell Wolfson.  When you own a company that counts the votes, politicians smile more kindly on you than they might otherwise… and for good reason.

"Somebody Blinked"
Continuing this dubious ‘tradition,’ the owner of Sequoia Pacific until recently was also accused of bribing public officials, in this case the Prime Minister of Ireland.

While the name Dr. Michael Smurfit is not well-known to Americans, his company manufactures the software used to compile more than two-thirds of the nation’s electronically-counted votes.

Perhaps this may help explain why, for the second Presidential election in a row, a Democratic bandwagon was derailed early on Election Night by an unusual television appearance by the Bush Family, after exit polls showed them losing in key battleground states.

While what transpired remains closely guarded, whatever went on behind the scenes was clearly decisive: Bush took the lead in the election, and John Kerry suffered the same fate as Al Gore had four years earlier...perhaps even in the same way.

"A Spaghetti Western Would Have Been Better"
Prima facie evidence that this year’s American Presidential Election was fixed can be found in the recent statements by numerous computer security experts that it could have been. And if it could have been, it probably was…

“If you leave the door to the bank vault open, sooner or later you’re going to get robbed,” said one.  “Its just human  nature. And besides, fixing elections is far more lucrative than robbing banks.”

Analysts describe the software as “spaghetti code,” tangled strands of instructions indecipherable to outsiders. Experts say the code can be manipulated without detection. In fact, many believe it may have happened already.

So it may be of interest to learn the Smurfit (the richest man in Ireland, though he’s not Irish) has a penchant for hanging out at Geneva racetracks with international gamblers and Zurich currency speculators. He must have a habit for picking winners, too: his company was successful in suborning the Louisiana Commissioner of Elections for over a decade…

Jerry Fowler had run up some big gambling debts at Harrah’s in Atlantic City, we learned. So he found the chance to pay off by making his voting machines “pay off” irresistible. In all, 22 people were indicted, 9 pled guilty, and Fowler went to jail.

But the Sequoia Pacific “Southeast Sales Manager,” a man named Pasquale “Rocco” Ricci of Marlton, New Jersey, barely even got a slap on the wrist. For the crime of suborning democracy in the state of Louisiana for over a decade, Mr. Ricci was sentenced to just a year…

A year of home detention.
Through multi-billion dollar federal subsidies, electronic voting has been pushed onto the American electorate. And its not hard to see why… the heady prospect of a sure thing.

But America may never again have an honest Presidential election.

Former Manhattan Commissioner of Elections Douglas Kellner told the MadCowMorningNews, “The problem is that, with an electronic voting system, you can never be sure that the vote is being recorded the same way it was cast. Because the only record is done electronically, there is no paper audit trail.

“And any good computer person can alter the electronic record.”

Most Americans, if they think about it at all, expect that the people standing behind the voting machines on which their votes are cast and tallied look like computer experts wearing white lab coats from IBM.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

"They Could Steal the Presidency!"
Investigating the ownership of the two companies that together dominate the American elections industry reveals evidence of routine and systemic bribery of public officials, not just here but overseas (the recent Prime Minister of Ireland, to give just one example.)

It is a world filled—not with guys in lab coats and pocket protectors—but with guys with links to the Mob, or international money launderers, Zurich currency manipulators, telecom scandals, off-shore Channel Islands accounts in the names of fictitious people, “untraceable shareholders,” Bahamian resort owners, and supra-national financiers.

Tests performed and videotaped by candidate Susan Bernacker in New Orleans in 1994 demonstrated that votes she cast for herself were electronically recorded for her opponent. This test was repeated multiple times with the same result thus confirming that the machine had been fraudulently altered to influence the outcome of the election. In Louisiana there, was an election in 1996 , which was for local

After Susan Bernacker lost a New Orleans City Council race in 1994, she decided to exercise her legal right to inspect the voting machines three days after the election… and she took along a video camera.

(The shocking results can be seen in our documentary “The Big Fix 2000”.)

Three times she keyed in her own name on the voting machines. and three times a vote for her opponent was registered. After these proceedings she perhaps justly feared for her life if she kept the secret to herself...She  convened a hastily-called press conference, and then retired from public life.

"A Nostradamus for our times"
"The next president of the United States may not be chosen by the voters of the United States. Instead, he or she may be the choice of whomever controls or manipulates the computer systems that tally the votes,” wrote Ronnie Dugger in the New York Times a decade ago.

“With the entire system shrouded in mystery and absent of assurances that the voting process is tamper-proof, voters these days have more reason than ever to ask, “Does my vote count?” “The whole damn thing is mind-boggling,” said someone who investigates computerized elections. “They could steal the presidency.”

“I don’t believe in counting votes in secret,” Manhattan Commissioner Doug Kellner told us.  “I think the public has a right to see what’s happening at every step of the way.”

The problem is so manifestly obvious that even humor columnist Dave Barry was moved to offer a desperate solution, in the Miami Herald: “My suggestion - call me crazy - is that we print the ballot on paper, with a box next to each candidate’s name. We instruct a voter to put an X in their candidate’s box. Then we have human beings count the Xs.”

Sounds easy, practical, and cheap.

In the coming weeks we’ll see why they’ll never let that happen.

<< Heel!

America’s Peloponnesian War

In 431 BC, the Greek world went to war against Athens. Thucydides claims that the reason for war was the “growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused.” The Athenians were a proud people who had ultimate faith in their institutions. They saw themselves as a model upon which the whole Greek world should mold itself. “I would prefer ...that you fix your eyes everyday on the greatness of Athens as she really is,” stated Pericles, “and you shall fall in love with her.”

The problem for Athens was that the majority of city-states in the Greek world did not share the Athenian vision. To most of the city states, especially those within the Delian League, Athens was an arrogant, power-hungry entity that would do anything to keep and maintain power. Athens bullied members of the Delian League into providing cash for security. Not trusting other member city-states, Athens moved the treasury to the mainland from the island of Delos. During the Peloponnesian War, the brutal actions of Athens toward the people of Lesbos and Melos sparked uprisings all over the empire. Although much of these were suppressed by Athens, this weakened the great democracy, eventually bringing a tragic defeat to the once mighty empire. Athens had to give up all colonies and the people were forced to stand by as the tattered remains of their glorious navy was put to the torch.

History has a way of repeating itself.

While rereading Pericles’ funeral oration from Book 2 of The Peloponnesian War, I could see George W. Bush, standing in front of a joint session of Congress or on the deck of an aircraft carrier. The locations may have changed, but much of the rhetoric is the same: we are great, the world envies us because we are free, the world wants to be like us, we don’t have to apologize for anything, we are the greatest idea to ever become a reality. Same basic ideas broken only by 2,500 years of history.

I am afraid that we are setting a course for the same fate that Athens experienced in the 5th century B.C. And recent events in Fallujah have only helped clarify that idea in my mind.

After the Mytilenians revolted against Athens on the island of Lesbos, the Athenian army came in and ordered the death of the entire male population and then divided the land among the wealthiest Athenians. Women and children were killed or sold into slavery. And Athens did this in the name of their greatness–it was their right as an empire.

In Fallujah, we are battling insurgents who are rebelling against our empire. But we are not only killing insurgents, but women and children—entire families are being gunned down as they try to flee their burning city. We came to liberate them from Saddam, yet in the process of their “liberation” some 100,000 Iraqi civilians have now died. We are punishing the very people we are purportedly “liberating.”

And then we wonder why they are not thankful? We wonder why the world does not side with us? We wonder why this “coalition” we have is breaking apart as more allies are leaving?

Today, it was revealed on NBC that there is footage of a US marine killing an unarmed, wounded Iraqi in a mosque. Take that image and combine it with the stacks of prisoners being humiliated at Abu Ghraib, you have the makings for more insurgency—not just within Iraq, but from the entire Muslim world who sees us not as liberators, but as power-hungry imperialists bent on taking away the rights and freedoms of Middle Easterners and dividing the land among wealthy American businessmen. Like Athens 2,500 years ago, people all over the world are fearful of American power and American willingness to use its power at the expense of others.

The results of this will be disastrous. When more Americans are beheaded, sympathy will not come our way. When more American buildings crumble, we will not get the outpouring of grief that we did before. The next time, more and more people the world over, including some among the ranks of our allies, will quietly shake their heads and say, “They had it coming.”

When Athens invaded Sicily in a last ditched attempt at glory in the 17th year of the Peloponnesian War, they met ultimate disaster. The Athenian navy was destroyed. Athenian sailors were killed or sold into slavery. It was the “most calamitous of defeats,” writes Thucydides, “for they were utterly and entirely defeated; their sufferings were on an enormous scale; their losses were, as they say, total: army, navy, everything was destroyed.” At this point, Athens did not reap much sympathy in the Greek world. To many, Athens had it coming.

Athens lost the Peloponnesian War.

If we do not learn from history and are not careful in the way we handle Iraq and other countries throughout the world, we will end up like Athens: utterly and entirely defeated.

Bruce David Janu
Pull No Punches.com
editor@pullnopunches.com

<< Heel!