Glenn Greenwald accepting the 2014 Polk Award. Credit Anicee Gohar/ IPS
While some decried the young reporters’ untimely death as being “in vain”, others say his legacy lives on, a reminder to even the most entrenched power structures that truth can prevail over brute force.
This legacy is maintained in part through the efforts of the Long Island University (LIU) Brooklyn, which annually honours exceptional journalists for their outstanding contributions to print, television and digital media.
This past Friday, over 30 reporters from some 15 news agencies received awards at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan for investigating such issues as homelessness, military impunity and corporate greed.
“I think the role of a story-teller is a very necessary one in this society,” New York Times correspondent Andrea Elliot told IPS on the sidelines of the ceremony, moments before accepting a prize for her five-part series that delved into the life of one of New York City’s 22,000 homeless children.
“The power of these stories lies in a reporter’s ability to be fair and reveal circumstances… in a way that can prompt people to debate these issues and perhaps take a position on them.”
Her words were borne out by the arrival halfway through the ceremony of Glen Greenwald and Laura Poitras, both of whom became household names last June owing to their reports, in The Guardian newspaper, on the details of the U.S. government’s domestic surveillance programme leaked by Edward Snowden.
It was the first time the journalists had returned to their home country since federal prosecutors charged Snowden with violating the country’s Espionage Act by making public secret documents belonging to the National Security Agency (NSA).
The two shared the stage, along with the award for national security reporting, with their colleague Ewen MacAskill, also of the Guardian, and the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman.
Paying homage to the whistleblower who fired the on-going debate on privacy and government spying, Greenwald said, “Journalism in general is not possible without great sources, and the immense courage of those who come forward to tell their stories.”
In a nod to the lives that form the nucleus of many stories, Matthieu Aikins – whose Rolling Stone article probing the execution of 10 Afghan civilians in the Nerkh district of Afghanistan’s eastern Wardak province earned him accolades for magazine reporting – lamented the senseless deaths that have characterised the U.S.’ invasion and occupation. He called attention to the plight of the powerless, most often the rural poor, “the bearded men” whose deaths seldom register in the consciousness of the world.
While many journalists draw a firm line between their “subjects” and themselves, others are deeply moved by the urgency of the issues they write about.
In a brief interview with IPS, The Washington Post’s Eli Saslow described his process of entering the lives of six of the roughly 47 million beneficiaries of the federal food stamps programme, whose 78-billion-dollar budget is stretched almost to breaking point.
“I sometimes spent several weeks at a time with one family, just watching them go through their days – it was my favourite part of the job because it was such a huge privilege to have access to their lives and experiences,” Saslow told IPS.
At the same time, he said, developing such intimacy with those who are struggling to put food on the table makes it hard to draw the line between journalism and advocacy.
“You feel for them and you should feel for them, so a lot of the time it’s a really tough balance. I try to find other ways and other places in my life to do advocacy… because I believe the only way to do justice to people and their life stories is to write honestly – about the things that are hard, the stuff that’s embarrassing, the moments that are joyful.”
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via IPS News
Edward Snowden, a low-level employee of Booz Allen Hamilton who blew the whistle on the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), unexpectedly exposed a powerful and seamless segment of the military-industrial complex – the world of contractors that consumes some 70 percent of this country’s 52-billion-dollar [...]]]>
via IPS News
Edward Snowden, a low-level employee of Booz Allen Hamilton who blew the whistle on the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), unexpectedly exposed a powerful and seamless segment of the military-industrial complex – the world of contractors that consumes some 70 percent of this country’s 52-billion-dollar intelligence budget.
Some commentators have pounced on Snowden’s disclosures to denounce the role of private contractors in the world of government and national security, arguing such spheres are best left to public servants. But their criticism misses the point.
It is no longer possible to determine the difference between the two: employees of the NSA – along with agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – and the employees of companies such as Booz Allen have integrated to the extent that they slip from one role in industry to another in government, cross-promoting each other and self-dealing in ways that make the fabled revolving door redundant, if not completely disorienting.
Snowden, a systems administrator at the NSA’s Threat Operations Centre in Hawaii, had worked for the CIA and Dell before joining Booz Allen. But his rather obscure role pales in comparison to those of others.
To best understand this tale, one must first turn to R. James Woolsey, a former director of CIA, who appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives in the summer of 2004 to promote the idea of integrating U.S. domestic and foreign spying efforts to track “terrorists”.
One month later, he appeared on MSNBC television, where he spoke of the urgent need to create a new U.S. intelligence czar to help expand the post-9/11 national surveillance apparatus.
On neither occasion did Woolsey mention that he was employed as senior vice president for global strategic security at Booz Allen, a job he held from 2002 to 2008.
“The source of information about vulnerabilities of and potential attacks on the homeland will not be dominated by foreign intelligence, as was the case in the Cold War. The terrorists understood us well, and so they lived and planned where we did not spy (inside the U.S.),” said Woolsey in prepared remarks before the U.S. House Select Committee on Homeland Security on Jun. 24, 2004.
In a prescient suggestion of what Snowden would later reveal, Woolsey went on to discuss expanding surveillance to cover domestic, as well as foreign sources.
“One source will be our vulnerability assessments, based on our own judgments about weak links in our society’s networks that can be exploited by terrorists,” he said. “A second source will be domestic intelligence. How to deal with such information is an extraordinarily difficult issue in our free society.”
One month later, Woolsey appeared on MSNBC’s “Hardball”, a news-talk show hosted by Chris Matthews, and told Matthews that the federal government needed a new high-level office – a DNI, if you will – to straddle domestic and foreign intelligence. Until then, the director of the CIA served as the head of the entire intelligence community (IC).
“The problem is that the intelligence community has grown so much since 1947, when the position of director of central intelligence was created, that it’s [become] impossible to do both jobs, running the CIA and managing the community,” he said.
Both these suggestions would lead to influential jobs and lucrative sources of income for his employer and colleagues.
The Director of National Intelligence
Fast forward to 2007. Vice Admiral Michael McConnell (ret.), Booz Allen’s then-senior vice president of policy, transformation, homeland security and intelligence analytics, was hired as the second czar of the new “Office of the Director of National Intelligence”, a post that oversees the work of Washington’s 17 intelligence agencies, which was coincidentally located just three kilometres from the company’s corporate headquarters.
Upon retiring as DNI, McConnell returned to Booz Allen in 2009, where he serves as vice chairman to this day. In August 2010, Lieutenant General James Clapper (ret), Booz Allen’s former vice president for military intelligence from 1997 to 1998, was hired as the fourth intelligence czar, a job he has held ever since. Indeed, one-time Booz Allen executives have filled the position five of the eight years of its existence.
When these two men were put in charge of the national-security state, they helped expand and privatise it as never before.
McConnell, for example, asked Congress to alter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to allow the NSA to spy on foreigners without a warrant if they were using Internet technology that routed through the United States.
“The resulting changes in both law and legal interpretations (and the) new technologies created a flood of new work for the intelligence agencies – and huge opportunities for companies like Booz Allen,” wrote David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth in a profile of McConnell published in the New York Times Jun. 15.
Last week, Snowden revealed to the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald that the NSA had created a secret system called “Prism” that allowed the agency to spy on electronic data of ordinary citizens around the world, both within and outside the United States.
Snowden’s job at Booz Allen’s offices in Hawaii was to maintain the NSA’s information technology systems. While he did not specify his precise connection to Prism, he told the South China Morning Post newspaper that the NSA hacked “network backbones – like huge Internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one”.
Woolsey had argued in favour of such surveillance following the disclosure of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping by the New York Times in December 2005.
“Unlike the Cold War, our intelligence requirements are not just overseas,” he told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the NSA in February 2006. “Courts are not designed to deal with fast-moving battlefield electronic mapping in which an al Qaeda or a Hezbollah computer might be captured which contains a large number of email addresses and phone numbers which would have to be checked out very promptly.”
Close ties
Exactly what Booz Allen does for the NSA’s electronic surveillance system revealed by Snowden is classified, but one can make an educated guess from similar contracts it has in this field – a quarter of the company’s 5.86 billion dollars in annual income comes from intelligence agencies.
The NSA, for example, hired Booz Allen in 2001 in an advisory role on the five-billion-dollar Project Groundbreaker to rebuild and operate the agency’s “nonmission-critical” internal telephone and computer networking systems.
Booz Allen also won a chunk of the Pentagon’s infamous Total Information Awareness contract in 2001 to collect information on potential terrorists in America from phone records, credit card receipts and other databases – a controversial programme defunded by Congress in 2003 but whose spirit survived in the Prism and other initiatives disclosed by Snowden.
The CIA pays a Booz Allen team led by William Wansley, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, for “strategic and business planning” for its National Clandestine Service, which conducts covert operations and recruits foreign spies.
The company also provides a 120-person team, headed by a former U.S. Navy cryptology lieutenant commander and Booz Allen senior executive adviser Pamela Lentz, to support the National Reconnaissance Organisation, the Pentagon agency that manages the nation’s military spy satellites.
In January, Booz Allen was one of 12 contractors to win a five-year contract with the Defence Intelligence Agency that could be worth up to 5.6 billion dollars to focus on “computer network operations, emerging and disruptive technologies, and exercise and training activity”.
Last month, the U.S. Navy picked Booz Allen as part of a consortium to work on yet another billion-dollar project for “a new generation of intelligence, surveillance and combat operations”.
Booz Allen wins these contracts in several ways. In addition to its connections with the DNI, it boasts that half of its 25,000 employees are cleared for top secret-sensitive compartmented intelligence, one of the highest possible security ratings. (One third of the 1.4 million people with such clearances work for the private sector.)
A key figure at Booz Allen is Ralph Shrader, current chairman, CEO and president, who came to the company in 1974 after working at two telecommunications companies – Western Union, where he was national director of advanced systems planning, and RCA, where he served in the company’s government communications system division.
In the 1970s, Western Union and RCA both took part in a secret surveillance programme known as Minaret, where they agreed to give the NSA all their clients’ incoming and outgoing U.S. telephone calls and telegrams.
Minaret and similar snooping programmes led to an explosive series of Congressional hearings in the 1970s by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Frank Church of Idaho in 1975.
* Jim Lobe contributed to this article.
]]>by Bernard Chazelle
Daniel Ellsberg, a man well versed in the matter, calls it “the most important leak in American history.” The scale of the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program is indeed staggering. Not to put too fine a point on it, if your phone records and Internet clicks are not [...]]]>
by Bernard Chazelle
Daniel Ellsberg, a man well versed in the matter, calls it “the most important leak in American history.” The scale of the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program is indeed staggering. Not to put too fine a point on it, if your phone records and Internet clicks are not already in federal custody, rest assured they soon will be. To add insult to injury, it might all be legal. A 29-year old Booz Allen employee, Edward Snowden, has risked his freedom to expose the mischief.
Not everyone was pleased. Ranting like a mad preacher, David Brooks called it a betrayal no fewer than ten times in one column. Wagging the mighty finger of pop psychology, the Times‘s self-anointed Mother Superior blamed Snowden’s betrayals on a life “unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society,” ie, untutored in the Brooksian view of authority as a call to blind worship. To others, the episode was a discomfiting reminder that the mantle of heroism can make cruel demands on those willing to put it on—especially the young. Snowden has forced open a much-needed debate, one that President Obama openly welcomes. And what better way to echo the sentiment than to have his National Intelligence Director, James Clapper, lie under oath to preempt any such debate?
Not that Snowden’s revelation did more than turn suspicion into confirmation. Ordinary Americans might not have suspected the cosmic scope of the snoopery, but terrorists, a breed to whom suspicion comes naturally, surely did. Indeed, the Pentagon has made no secret of its plan to expand its Global Information Gridpast the “yottabyte” mark. How big is that? Think of a giant vacuum cleaner designed to hoover up the equivalent of one million DVDs for every human being on earth. Now ask yourself: why would anyone need so much storage if not for trawling every critter that swims the waterways of the Internet: emails, tweets, pics, vids, chats, etc? The NSA’s claim to be merely after your metadata (email addresses, phone numbers, durations, etc) is preposterous. Metadata alone could never use up more than one millionth of the storage capacity. The NSA has hopped on the Big-Data bandwagon or, as it were, the All-Data supertrain.
Any terrorist aware of the hazards of Big Data knows that spurious correlations increase faster than data size and so will pray that the NSA keeps a diary of all life forms on the planet. If you’re a needle hiding in a haystack, all you want is more hay, like, say, a yottabyte worth of it. Bad guys will love Big Data. Social activists not so much. If the next J. Edgar Hoover doesn’t fancy the cut of your jib, he’ll come after you, file servers blazing, with more details about your past than you’ll ever remember. No need to be unduly paranoid, though. The craven Chinese may have hacked into the Obama and Romney campaigns, but thank God no American president would ever break into the party headquarters of his rival. Thank God the FBI would never spread lies about a university administrator. Thank God it would never pressure a civil rights leader to commit suicide. Let’s not surrender to cynicism and imagine that anything like McCarthyism could ever happen in the United States. We don’t call it the land of the free for nothing.
But what’s freedom good for if you’re dead? Some say that global surveillance is the price to pay for staying alive. Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Dianne Feinstein, and her House counterpart, Mike Rogers, credit Big Brother for the capture of Najibullah Zazi and David Headley, two genuine nasties. Alas, if that’s the best our two NSA cheerleaders have to offer, they might as well pack up their pom-poms and go home. A former British foreign office minister dispatched their boast as an illusion: Zazi’s name was caught by British Intelligence the old-fashioned way; likewise, the arrest of David Headley, who was involved in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, came in the wake of a British tip-off of the conventional kind. Former NSA surveillance huncho, William Binney, characterizes the entire spying dragnet as useless. Acting on a Russian tip, the NSA did record phone calls of the Tsarnaev brothers before the Boston bombings, and we all know how effective that was. Almost as helpful as the interceptions of the phone calls that bin Laden’s chief of operations made right before 9/11. The only attacks the Feds seem good at preventing are those it instigates. All-time favorites include the sting operation that netted the crackerjack squad of terrorists whose first step to Armageddon was to order al-Qaeda boots from an FBI informant. (Who would want to meet the 72 virgins with the wrong shoes on?)
Despite our best efforts to create new terrorists by vaporizing their children with our drones, they still remain a rare breed. Matthew Yglesias estimates the number of lives saved annually by airport security measures as approximately zero. Saving zero lives does not come cheap, mind you. Body scanning alone has cost the US taxpayer billions of dollars. No sooner was he done running Homeland Security than Michael Chertoff cashed in the big bucks at Rapiscan Systems by leading thecheers for full-body scans. This revolving-door pathology afflicting the Beltway can appear paradoxical. Ever wondered why the NSA outsources work that falls squarely within its core competencies? No surprise if the agency contracts out its catering, plumbing, and lawn mowing, but… information technology? The NSA employs thousands of IT experts, from seasoned sysadmins to world-class cryptographers. Whatever Snowden did for the agency as a Booz Allen employee, the NSA could do it in-house more cheaply. So why doesn’t it? The answer to this $75-billion question is money, gobs of it floating right under the nose of public servants cruelly kept by law from getting a piece of the action. The revolving door is there to release the tension. It is a legal mechanism for funneling billions of taxpayer dollars into a handful of private wallets. Contractors serve stints in government for the same reasons thieves case a bank before robbing it. There they learn to operate the moola pipeline and keep it flowing into the right pockets.
Booz Allen Hamilton revolves doors better than most. The aforementioned spook-in-chief, James Clapper, is a proud alum. One of his predecessors as National Intelligence director, Mike McConnell, is now vice-chairman of the company. Former CIA director, James Woolsey, was a Booz Allen VP. The company is majority-owned by the Carlyle Group, the private equity giant with long ties to the Bush family. Carlyle has syphoned a cool $2 billion from Booz Allen, which itself derives 98% of its revenues from the US taxpayer. This is crony capitalism at its finest. Being perhaps a bit too obvious, the scheme requires a bevy of propagandists to hide the true motives behind a veil of fear. To point out that lightning outkills terrorism will earn you a stern reminder that “we must kill them over there so they don’t kill us over here.” The propagandists keep at the ready a whole Ptolemaic jumble of rhetorical epicycles with at its center the winning slogan: “Be scared, be very scared!” And thus, with Monty-Pythonesque clarity, can Tom Friedman urge us to surrender our privacy now so a new terrorist attack does not force us to surrender it later.
Politicans play along with this charade for fear of being seen as soft on terrorism, some of them hoping that one day they too will hitch a ride on the gravy train. President Obama gives the spooks a blank check to buy himself an insurance policy: a means to deflect the blame if and when terror strikes. Don’t count on any pushback from the mainstream media. Terrorism makes good copy and, like a four-leaf clover, gets hyped in proportion to its rarity. Thriving on its incestuous relationship with power, the corporate media has blinded itself to the very idea of a conflict of interest. When someone hinted at a sweet deal between Chertoff and Rapiscan on Hardball, a “shocked, shocked” Chris Matthews called it slander.
No one disputes the need to keep secret tabs on terrorists and monitor their communications. What’s at issue is the existence of a cyber-panopticon handing over all details of everyone’s private life to government agencies with no meaningful oversight. The current outrage over the NSA is rightly focused on its Orwellian angle. Yet to sate the vengeful hunger of latter-day J. Edgar Hoovers doesn’t alone explain the rise of the Surveillance State. An important driver is the dominant social engineering project of our time: the upward redistribution of wealth to the one percent. In the case at hand, the project was given a boost by the co-occurrence of two trends: the commodification of Big-Data technology and the post-9/11 resurgence of American paranoia. When your enemy hates you for your freedoms, don’t you want a supersized Big Brother by your side? But here’s the twist: the attendant growth in defense spending ran smack against the neoliberal push for smaller government. The solution? The rise of a bloated industry of overpaid private contractors feeding off the public trough. Bravo, one percent, the maneuver was brilliant!
As his antsy critics swarm out to smear him, Edward Snowden faces a bleak future. He didn’t just expose the powerful: he humiliated them. For that unforgivable sin, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen called Snowden a “cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood.” (As a hack cross-dressing as a journalist, he would know.) House Speaker John Boehner labeled the young whistleblower a traitor. Were he to be extradited to the US, Snowden would face a long prison sentence. Perhaps President Obama will indulge his forgotten love of whistleblowers and pardon him as penance for letting the DOJ prosecute more whistleblowers than all of his predecessors combined. Perhaps he will bestow the medal of freedom upon Glenn Greenwald for shining light on government scandals. Perhaps the NSA will turn its Fort Meade headquarters into a soup kitchen…
– Bernard Chazelle is Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He is currently on sabbatical at the College de France in Paris and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the author of the book, “The Discrepancy Method,” an investigation into the power of randomness in computing, his current research focuses on “natural algorithms” and the algorithmic complexity of living matter. He has written extensively about politics and music.
]]>Those unnamed officials “from a country critical of Iran’s nuclear program” are at it again. This week they leaked an illustration to to the Associated Press which supposedly demonstrates that “Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive [...]]]>
Those unnamed officials “from a country critical of Iran’s nuclear program” are at it again. This week they leaked an illustration to to the Associated Press which supposedly demonstrates that “Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.” The AP headline is sure to bring in hits, but is it accurate reporting?
“The diagram leaked to the Associated Press this week is nothing more than either shoddy sources or shoddy science,” write physicists Yousaf Butt and Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. “In either case, the world can keep calm and carry on,” say the experts, whose article should be read in full.
Butt and Dalnoki-Veress use the word “shoddy”, but that may be an understatement when evaluating the central point of George Jahn’s “exclusive” report:
The graphic has not yet been authenticated; however, even if authentic, it would not qualify as proof of a nuclear weapons program. Besides the issue of authenticity, the diagram features quite a massive error, which is unlikely to have been made by research scientists working at a national level.
The image released to the Associated Press shows two curves: one that plots the energy versus time, and another that plots the power output versus time, presumably from a fission device. But these two curves do not correspond: If the energy curve is correct, then the peak power should be much lower — around 300 million ( 3×108) kt per second, instead of the currently stated 17 trillion (1.7 x1013) kt per second. As is, the diagram features a nearly million-fold error.
This diagram does nothing more than indicate either slipshod analysis or an amateurish hoax.
…this graph – which is only slightly less hilariously primitive than the one Benjamin Netanyahu infamously touted with a straight face at the UN – has Farsi written under it to imbue it with that menacing Iranian-ish feel, but also helpfully uses English to ensure that US audiences can easily drink up its scariness. As The Atlantic’s Robert Wright noted: “How considerate of the Iranians to label their secret nefarious nuke graph in English!”. It’s certainly possible that Iranian scientists use English as a universal language of science, but the convenient mixing of Farsi and English should at least trigger some skepticism.
…the Associated Press story does not change the U.S. Government’s assessment that Iran would require, not a few weeks, but many months to build a deliverable nuclear weapon, if it decided to do so. Secretary of Defense Panetta recently estimated that it would take two to three years, similar to the estimate made by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. In order to implement such a crash program, Iran would need to expel IAEA inspectors, use existing facilities and stockpiles to produce weapons grade uranium, and probably test a nuclear device, all of which would raise the alarm to the international community.
And Greenwald reminds us why journalists need to be especially accurate and skeptical when reporting on Iran’s nuclear program:
The case for the attack on Iraq was driven, of course, by a mountain of fabricated documents and deliberately manipulated intelligence which western media outlets uncritically amplified. Yet again, any doubts that they are willing and eager to do exactly the same with regard to the equally fictitious Iranian Threat should be forever dispelled by behavior like this.
As always, the two key facts to note on Iran are these: 1) the desperation to prevent Iran from possessing a nuclear weapon has nothing to do with fear that they would commit national suicide by using it offensively, but rather has everything to do with the deterrent capability it would provide - i.e., nukes would prevent the US or Israel from attacking Iran at will or bullying it with threats of such an attack; and 2) the US-led sanctions regime now in place based on this fear-mongering continues to impose mass suffering and death on innocent Iranians. But as long as media outlets like AP continue to blindly trumpet whatever is shoveled to them by the shielded, unnamed “country critical of Iran’s atomic program”, these facts will be suppressed and fear levels kept sky-high, thus enabling the continuation and escalation of the hideous sanctions regime, if not an outright attack.
Lobe Log publishes Hawks on Iran every Friday. Our posts highlight militaristic commentary and confrontational policy recommendations about Iran from a variety of sources including news articles, think tanks and pundits.
William Kristol & Jamie Fly, Weekly Standard: Neoconservative pundit William Kristol who cofounded such jewels as the [...]]]>
Lobe Log publishes Hawks on Iran every Friday. Our posts highlight militaristic commentary and confrontational policy recommendations about Iran from a variety of sources including news articles, think tanks and pundits.
William Kristol & Jamie Fly, Weekly Standard: Neoconservative pundit William Kristol who cofounded such jewels as the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) and who serves on the board of the hyperbolic Israel advocacy group, the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) tries to pressure the President into bringing the U.S. closer to war with Iran with ideologue in arms, Jamie Fly: (Jim Lobe has the story.)
President Obama says a nuclear Iran is unacceptable. The real and credible threat of force is probably the last hope of persuading the Iranian regime to back down. So: Isn’t it time for the president to ask Congress for an Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iran’s nuclear program?
Instead of running away from it, administration officials could be putting the military option front and center and ensuring it is seen as viable. And if the administration flinches, Congress could consider passing such an authorization anyway.
And here is Mitt Romney’s response to the article from CBS’s “Face the Nation“:
…I can assure you if I’m President, the Iranians will have no question but that I would be willing to take military action, if necessary, to prevent them from becoming a nuclear threat to the world. I don’t believe at this stage, therefore, if I’m President, that we need to have war powers approval or a special authorization for military force. The President has that capacity now.
Former Senator Charles Robb (D-Va): Testifying at this week’s Armed Services Committee hearing titled “Addressing the Iranian Nuclear Challenge: Understanding the Military Options” was former Senator Charles Robb who now co-chairs the Bipartisan Policy Center’s (BPC) Task Force on Iran. Robb mainly reiterated recommendations from a BPC report released in February. According to BPC staffers, “only the credible threat of force, combined with sanctions” affords “any realistic hope of an acceptable diplomatic resolution.” Unsuprisingly, “force” is the key to successful diplomacy:
There are three primary components of a credible military threat: an effective information and messaging strategy, economic preparations and credible military readiness activities. Undertaking these steps would boost the credibility of the military option, thereby strengthening the chance for sanctions and diplomacy to succeed in bringing about a peaceful resolution to the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program.
What exactly is the BPC? Jim Lobe has the scoop:
We’ve been covering BPC’s work on Iran pretty intensively both on IPS and Lobelog since the fall of 2008 when it issued its first Iran report whose primary author, as I understand it, was Michael Rubin (and Dennis Ross was on the task force that produced it).
The staff director for their Iran reports is Michael Makovsky whose RightWeb profile was updated just two months ago.
Makovsky, brother of David at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), not only served at one time in the IDF, but also was a West Bank settler, according to reports. When I asked him directly about a month ago whether those reports were accurate, he abruptly terminated an otherwise relatively cordial conversation about his service in the Feith’s Office of Special Plans in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. If those reports are indeed true, and, to my knowledge, he’s never denied them, one has to ask how someone who presumably supports Israeli settlements in occupied territory could become Foreign Policy Director of something called the “Bipartisan Policy Center”.
When they unveiled their last report in February you can read my synopsis here, Robb and Sen. Coates presided. I wrote about their first report in 2008.
Interestingly, several of the key players on the Iran task force at BPC were invited to a Foundation for the Defense of Democracy (FDD) retreat in the Bahamas back in May 2007, entitled “Confronting the Iranian Threat: The Way Forward”. In addition to Makovsky, Rademaker was invited, as were Michael Rubin and Air Force Lt. Gen. Chuck Wald (ret.), who has been a major contributor to the Iran task force and co-written op-eds about its work with Robb and Coates. Precisely who turned up there, I don’t know, but Wald told me at the time that he wasn’t able to attend. I wrote about the invitation on Lobelog at the time. You can find it here. It was kind of a who’s who among the neo-con hawks: Bret Stephens, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Michael Ledeen, etc. etc.
Congress, Foreign Policy: Josh Rogin reports on a bipartisan letter spearheaded by Sens. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Roy Blunt (R-MO) that was sent out last Friday by 44 senators calling on the President to cease diplomatic efforts if the Iranians don’t submit to 3 U.S. demands, as well as continue the relentless sanctions regime and ramp up the military option:
“On the other hand, if the sessions in Moscow produce no substantive agreement, we urge you to reevaluate the utility of further talks at this time and instead focus on significantly increasing the pressure on the Iranian government through sanctions and making clear that a credible military option exists,” they wrote. ”As you have rightly noted, ‘the window for diplomacy is closing.’ Iran’s leaders must realize that you mean precisely that.”
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald responds:
This implication is clear: a military attack by the U.S. on Iran is at least justified, if not compelled, if a satisfactory agreement is not quickly reached regarding Iran’s nuclear program. At the same time, the letter itself virtually ensures no such agreement is possible because the conditions it imposes as the “absolute minimum” are ones everyone knows Iran will never agree to (closing the Fordow facility and giving up its right to enrich uranium above 5 percent). It also declares that it is not only Iran’s possession of a nuclear weapon that is “unacceptable” — diplomatic code for “we’ll go to war to stop it” — but its mere “capability” to build one.
As does the Washington Post’s hawk-in-chief Jennifer Rubin who applauds the increasingly militaristic trend in Congress and the fact that it’s “unlikely the Iranians will agree to any of those conditions” in the letter while yet again agitating for the U.S. to wage war on Iran (emphasis mine):
But those crippling sanctions have come very late as Iran compiles a sufficient stockpile of enriched uranium to make multiple bombs. We are drawing close to the point when Obama will face the choice he has tried to avoid: Act militarily, support the Israelis’ military action or accept the “unacceptable,” a nuclear-armed revolutionary state sponsor of terror? And as we arrive at that point it becomes clear that the only reason for Israel (with fewer military capabilities than the United States) to act militarily rather than the United States would be that the president, even on the most critical national security threat of our time, won’t lead.
Yet despite all the huffing and puffing that Rubin does on a weekly basis about the “threat” the U.S. faces from Iran, just this February Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified that “Iran is unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict.” Add to that the top U.S. intelligence official James Clapper’s reiteration that Iran has not made a decision to build a nuclear bomb and that diplomacy and sanctions–as opposed to the militaristic measures that Rubin advocates–remain the most effective means of dissuading the Iranians from going nuclear.
Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post: What sanctions good for according to Rubin (forget that diplomacy mumbo jumbo):
We should, of course, move forward on sanctions insofar as they may undermine the current regime and push segments of the population in the country to align themselves with the Green Movement.
And here is her lament for what has so far been U.S. refusal to militarily strike Iran:
Given Obama’s refusal to act forcefully against Iran’s weaker, non-nuclear armed ally Syria, I strongly suspect it will be up to Israel. That would be a pitiful result of a lackadaisical American approach to our primary security threat and the ignominious end to “leading from behind.” Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, but at this point that certainly seems like the most likely outcome.
Washington Post: The Post’s hawkish editorial board calls for U.S. rejection of Iran’s right to peacefully enrich uranium (putting them in line with the Israeli position) and increasing pressure on Iran:
The Obama administration must nevertheless be prepared to take an Iranian “no” for an answer. It should resist any effort by Russia or other members of the international coalition to weaken the steps that Iran must take, or to grant Tehran major sanctions relief for partial concessions. It should continue to reject recognition of an Iranian “right” to enrich uranium.
The United States and its allies also should have a strategy for quickly and significantly increasing the pressure on the Khamenei regime if the negotiations break down. Israel may press for military action; if that option is to be resisted, there must be a credible and robust alternative.
Mark Kirk (R-Ill.): Following the Moscow talks Senate hawk Mark Kirk calls for a “final” (what happens after?) round of more sanctions on Iran:
After three rounds of meetings, Iran remains in violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions ordering it to halt all its uranium enrichment activities. The House and Senate should immediately negotiate a final Iran sanctions bill that can be sent to the President’s desk in July. This legislation should include new and tougher sanctions proposals put forward by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, including sanctions targeting Iran’s energy and financial sectors, shipping and insurance.
Jed Babbin, American Spectator: The Deputy Undersecretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush who stated in 2006 that he was “willing to kill as many people as it requires to take out Hezbollah” declares that “[d]iplomacy won’t work” with Iran so for now covert operations, particularly in the cyber realm, should be vigorously deployed through all available means including the U.S.’s vast arsenal:
]]>Expanding our cyberwar operations against Iran is one of the best options. Offensive cyberwar is far cheaper, and easier, than the defensive. We can, and should, disrupt Iranian government and military functions as often as we can. Iran is reportedly developing a new computer language to make such attacks more difficult. Our cyber warriors should be tasked to infiltrate that project and plant malicious software — “malware” in cyber jargon — to gather information from and at our command disrupt or destroy the computer networks the new system runs on.
A future president — let’s hope one will take office next year — should consider the “bad luck” option. Covert operations need not be conducted only by special operations forces, CIA agents, or computer warriors. We have a significant variety of stealthy weapons and weapon platforms. That president would have the option of making an equally large variety of Presidential Determinations authorizing the use of those weapons against Iran’s nuclear facilities and its intelligence and military centers.
First, he suggests that the same sort of humanitarian considerations that war supporters are currently making about Libya were far stronger in 2003 with regard to Iraq; thus, if one supports intervention in Libya, one would logically be required to have supported intervention in Iraq:
Now, those opposed to U.S. involvement in the civil war in Libya are deemed indifferent to the repression and brutalities suffered by the Libyan people from Gadaffi and willing to protect his power. This rationale is as flawed logically as it is morally. Why didn’t this same moral calculus justify the attack on Iraq? Saddam Hussein really was a murderous, repressive monster: at least Gadaffi’s equal when it came to psychotic blood-spilling. Those who favored regime change there made exactly the same arguments as [John] Judis (and many others) make now for Libya…Why does that reasoning justify war in Libya but not Iraq?
It certainly is the case that supporters of the Iraq war manipulatively invoked humanitarian considerations in order to paint opponents of the war as callous. But is it really the case that the humanitarian case for war was much stronger in Iraq than it is in Libya? It seems to me that there is one important consideration that Greenwald doesn’t mention: Saddam Hussein certainly had more blood on his hands than Qaddafi overall, but by the time of the 2003 invasion his worst atrocities were in the past. He undoubtedly remained a brutal dictator with a horrific human rights record, but was no longer committing bloodshed on the scale of, for instance, the Al-Anfal campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s. Furthermore, in 2003 he was not imminently threatening to commit more atrocities; in Libya, by contrast, Qaddafi has been threatening to inflict mass violence on rebels (not to mention peaceful protesters) in the immediate future.
I would suggest that if any intervention of this kind can be justified — which is, of course, a question open to debate — its aim must be preventive rather than punitive. Such an intervention should not, in other words, be intended simply to punish a dictator for past atrocities, but must have the prospect of preventing atrocities in the imminent future. Thus the humanitarian argument for war in Iraq was deeply unconvincing in 2003, but it would have been far stronger if the year were 1988 and Saddam was in the process of slaughtering the Kurds. (This is not to say that an intervention in Iraq would necessarily have be justified in 1988, but simply that it would have been more justified than it was in 2003.) Of course, the fact that the Reagan Administration continued to actively support Saddam during his late-80s atrocities — with nary a peep from many of the same people who 15 years later would be piously invoking the humanitarian case for war — was one reason many war opponents were deeply skeptical of this argument for invasion.
Second, Greenwald mocks the notion that the US government is motivated by benevolence and earnest humanitarianism:
But what I cannot understand at all is how people are willing to believe that the U.S. Government is deploying its military and fighting this war because, out of abundant humanitarianism, it simply cannot abide internal repression, tyranny and violence against one’s own citizens….They just all suddenly woke up one day and decided to wage war in an oil-rich Muslim nation because they just can’t stand idly by and tolerate internal repression and violence against civilians? Please.
This is a frequent line of argument from critics of the Libya intervention on the left. It has the added virtue of being almost irrefutable: no one can seriously examine the US record of inaction when friendly governments commit atrocities against their citizens and conclude that American decision-making is motivated solely by some humanitarian calculus independent of geopolitical considerations. (I do, however, find the notion that this intervention is primarily about oil to be deeply unconvincing.)
However, even if we concede that Western policymakers are hypocrites and that their claims to be motivated solely by disinterested benevolence are disingenuous, what follows from this? Presumably, whether the Libyan intervention is just or wise must be decided on the basis of its concrete effects on the ground — and not on the basis of whether or not the people pushing it are noble and benevolent. That is to say, if we believe that the intervention will prevent mass atrocities without exacerbating the crisis, we should support it even if Western leaders are hypocrites for doing so. If, on the other hand, we believe that the intervention will only make matters worse, we should oppose it even if we believed that these leaders were genuinely well-intentioned.
As stated, there are many, many good reasons why someone could be opposed to the current intervention. But I don’t think that either of these arguments, which have frequently been made by opponents of the attack on Libya, are particularly convincing.
]]>You should read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:
]]>With the sights of Washington’s hawks now focused squarely on Iran, many critics feel they’ve seen the movie before as the Islamic Republic’s alleged nefarious activities in Iraq are relentlessly trotted out. And many of them even have their roots in the same journalist, Michael Gordon, who played a central role in the Times’ catastrophic abdication of its responsibility to the public in 2002 and 2003. [...]
Gordon, rather than exercising caution with the information he was receiving, seemed to go beyond what he reported and what he was handed. Investigative journalist Gareth Porter documented for the American Prospect how it was not Gordon’s sources, but Gordon himself who “articulated the narrative of an Iranian-inspired attack on Americans” in a briefing reported for a mid-2007 New York Times story.
And you might also be forgiven for considering Gordon a reporter with a less than savory record on matters that might drive the nation to war. He was the reporting and writing partner of none other than Judith Miller, the former New York Times reporter whose cozy relationships with Iraqi defectors and administration officials were instrumental in rousing public opinion against Iraq. Miller has since been dispatched by the Times and has staked out a more overtly ideological position writing for outlets like Fox News, where her distortions and use of almost exclusively neoconservative-aligned sources don’t prompt questions.
In 2002, however, Miller and Gordon were working together on stories about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction for theTimes. On Sunday, September 8, they had a front-page story on Iraq’s attempts to acquire aluminum tubes. Miller and Gordon wrote that the tubes were intended for centrifuges aimed at producing highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon. [...]
That Judith Miller was dismissed at all is something of an aberration. Gordon’s treatment is more par for the course. [Glenn] Greenwald notes that even after his error-laced Iraq reporting, [Jeffrey] Goldberg was lured away from the New Yorker, presumably with “bags full of cash,” by the Atlantic. He and Michael Gordon have now moved on to reporting about Iran — Goldberg through the eyes of the hawkish Israelis, and Gordon from Iraq, through single-source raw intel and unnamed military and administration officials.
This is not looking forward nor looking back, but not looking at all — a collective aversion of the eyes — as those same journalists responsible for enabling an aggressive war on questionable premises do so once again from their perch atop the journalistic establishment.
Here’s an excerpt:
Given the broad consensus that Osama bin Laden and Co. carried out the 9/11 attacks, it’s easy to understand that mentioning his group continues to elicit strong emotions — among them fear, anger, and a resulting desire to continue to wage war against Al Qaeda.
So when hawks are trying to drum up support for a war in the Middle East, it’s natural for them to try to connect the target country with Al Qaeda. This pattern was easily observable in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Cliff May, having already morphed from a journalist into the president of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies by 2002, opted to paint with a broad brush: linking people together because they think alike. They’re “Jihadists,” he wrote, and that was enough to slap bull’s eyes on a wide variety of Arab and Muslim heads.
The Jihadist framework even allowed him, as he outlined in a September 2002 column for the Scripps Howard News Service, to “easily accommodate true religious fanatics such as Osama bin Laden as well as those like Saddam Hussein…”
[...]
As his [new NRO article conflating Iran and Al Qaeda] draws to a close, May gets even more specific about the “Jihadi” connections: Iran, he says, is working toward fulfilling Al Qaeda’s “mission”:
Al-Qaeda and the terrorist groups it leads have a mission. Iran’s revolutionary theocrats and the terrorist groups they instruct have goals and a strategy to achieve them.
Then comes a thinly veiled threat of a military attack against Iran: “Iran’s rulers should be under the guns — metaphorically for the present….” But the present, too, shall pass. And when it does, May, pressed by Glenn Greenwald, has made his policy preferences clear.
The “Al Qaeda link” lives on, with just as little evidence as there was in Iraq. Secular Arab nationalists, Sunnis, Shiites — all the same: “Jihadis.” “Al Qaeda and Iran,” the mantra goes, and emotions will run high. It remains to be seen if the U.S. public will fall for the ruse again.
Read the whole piece here at AlterNet.
]]>The truth is, while hawks portray airstrikes as a kind of magic bullet that can end the Iranian nuclear [...]]]>
The truth is, while hawks portray airstrikes as a kind of magic bullet that can end the Iranian nuclear program, it is indeed a less than ‘ideal’ plan — it may not work at all.
Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg wrote, in his August story, that even the Israelis are convinced that an attack might only temporarily set back the Iranian program: “[T]hey believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years.” Many experts estimate the length of the delay will be even less.
Goldberg cited the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq’s secret Osirak nuclear facility as an example of a successful attack: “In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting—forever, as it turned out—Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.” (Glenn Greenwald notes Goldberg made the opposite claim in the run up to the Iraq war: Hussein’s program never ended.)
The “success” of the Osirak attack is a common theme among neoconservatives. The Hudson Institute cited the strike in a January 2010 report urging the U.S. to support an Israeli attack on Iran and to prepare for the resulting wider war.
At the Progressive Realist blog, Louisville professor and blogger Rodger Payne lines up a number of academic and other studies that challenge this conclusion. Here’s an excerpt of one (PDF):
The 1981 Israeli aerial striike on Iraqi nuclear facilities at Osiraq is frequently cited as a successful use of preventive military force, and may be used to justify similar attacks in the future. However, closer examination of the Osiraq attack reveals that it did not substantially delay the Iraqi nuclear program, and may have even hastened it. Attempts to replicate the “success” at Osiraq are likely to do even worse, as proliferating states are now routinely dispersing and concealing their nuclear, biological, and chemical programs to decrease their vulnerability to air strikes. Given the poor track record of preventive attacks in controlling the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, American interests will be best served in the future by embracing other tools of counterproliferation.
Most honest appraisals of a potential military strike against Iran’s nuclear program admit that it may only be a setback for the alleged weapons program — if it works at all.
“Numerous analysts doubt that Israel is capable of carrying out a successful strike,” Matt Duss wrote this summer, lining up experts.
A study by a British think-tank this summer concluded, according to Haaretz, that “[a]n Israeli attack on Iran would be the start of a protracted conflict that would be unlikely to prevent the eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and might even encourage it.”
Even if the U.S. — as Lieberman wants — carries out a strike with its more advanced weaponry and planes, the results will likely be the same. There’s no reason to expect that U.S. intelligence or technological abilities are so much greater than Israel’s that a U.S. attack on the Iranian nuclear program would be decisive.
This is something Duss and I have harped on as of late: not only would an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities be no “cakewalk,” but like the Osirak attack, it probably will not accomplish its ostensible longer-term objectives.
]]>For those who lament the utter lack of any compelling television discussion about foreign policy, particularly about U.S.-Iran relations, there was actually a very engaging conversation yesterday on MSNBC.
On the Dylan Ratigan Show, a midday program on the cable news channel MSNBC, neocon Cliff May of the [...]]]>
For those who lament the utter lack of any compelling television discussion about foreign policy, particularly about U.S.-Iran relations, there was actually a very engaging conversation yesterday on MSNBC.
On the Dylan Ratigan Show, a midday program on the cable news channel MSNBC, neocon Cliff May of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies debated Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald. The discussion was heated throughout, but picks up at about five and half minutes in, when May accused Ratigan of being anti-American. Then the discussion really dug into the actual threat posed by Iran to the U.S. — “Uncooperative, for sure, but just how dangerous are they?” asked Ratigan to kick off the discussion.
Check it out here (or here on Greenwald’s site), or watch the clip:
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Ratigan asserted that Iran is not a threat and May, for the second time, said that Iranians chant “Death to America.” Greenwald made two great points here: 1) That Iran sees the U.S. and Israel’s bellicose rhetoric against the Islamic Republic, and sees occupying U.S. armies to its East and West; and that 2) one need only glance at newspapers to see that America and Israel have launched numerous wars of aggression in recent decades, whereas to find an unprovoked Iranian attack on another country, one must go back centuries.
May, upon being accused of being a “warmonger,” asks: “How am I war mongering when I support President Obama and the sanctions, which is a way to peacefully…”
Greenwald interrupted: “What if the sanctions fail? Do you think the U.S. should attack Iran to stop its nuclear weapons program?”
May: “I think we have a big problem if the sanctions fail…”
Greenwald cut him off, and they went back and forth. “Why can’t you answer that?”
May responded: “I think we should…”
Then Greenwald came back: “You think we should. Exactly. That’s what makes you a war monger. You want to attack Iran even though they’re not attacking us, just like you wanted to attack Iraq even though they didn’t attack us. That’s what a war monger is: someone who wants to launch aggressive wars.”
May came back again with the Iranian slogan, “Death to America.”
“That’s all you got?” Ratigan asked, exacerbated, saying its “stick and stones.”
“You sound like a six-year-old,” Greenwald piled on.
May again restated the threat of slogans, citing the U.S. and Israel. “That may not concern you, you may think that’s not a problem. But happily most Americans watching Ahmadinejad on TV understand that.”
Actually, “most Americans” don’t. As I wrote last week on the big, new Chicago Council poll on American opinions about foreign policy:
[O]nly 18 percent of respondents think the U.S. should launch a military strike on Iranian nuclear targets now. Even if diplomacy and sanctions fail to stop Iranian advancement toward a bomb, a slim plurality still think the U.S. should not bomb Iran (49 percent oppose it, 47 would support it).
The conversation overall was the sort of frank discussion we don’t see enough of on television: two impassioned figures on each side of a debate — a real progressive and a neoconservative, no less — and a host who takes sides with reason instead of with a misplaced notion of “balance” or “equal time.”
Update: MJ Rosenberg, a long-time insider and observer of Middle East affairs in D.C., gives his take on the Greenwald vs. May debate. In his Friday newsletter, which has been running more than a decade, Rosenberg places May’s hawkish position in the context of an uptick in chatter about bombing Iran. From the Political Corrections website, a project of Media Matters Action Network, where Rosenberg is a senior foreign policy fellow:
]]>Greenwald opposes confrontation with Iran and believes the case for war is utterly phony. May is a war hawk on Iran, as he was on Iraq. (He also supports any and all Israeli military actions.)
May is kicking off the fall campaign to get America to support an Israeli attack on Iran. Of course, an Israeli attack would be viewed by the entire Muslim world as a US attack and would, as our military warns, endanger US forces throughout the region.
The “Bomb Iran” campaign is just beginning. If President Obama does not stand firm, May and his friends may win the day as they did in 2003.