In a dazzling display of chutzpah, the White House is demanding that Congress demonstrate blind trust in a U.S. intelligence establishment headed by James Clapper, a self-confessed perjurer.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a lot to ask in seeking approval for a military attack on Syria, a country posing no credible threat to the United States. But with the help of the same corporate media that cheer-led us into war with Iraq, the administration has already largely succeeded in turning public discussion into one that assumes the accuracy of both the intelligence on the apparent Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack in Syria and President Barack Obama\u2019s far-fetched claim that Syria is somehow a threat to the United States.<\/p>\n
Here we go again with the old political gamesmanship over ”facts” as a prelude to war, a replay of intelligence trickery from Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin to Iraq’s nonexistent WMD. Once more, White House officials are mounting a full-court press in Congress, hoping there will be enough ball turnovers to enable the administration to pull out a victory, with the corporate media acting as hometown referees.<\/p>\n
And in the weekend talk shows, Secretary of State John Kerry, team co-captain in this transparent effort to tilt the playing field, certainly had his game face on. Kerry left little doubt that he KNOWS that the Syrian government is guilty of launching a chemical weapons attack on suburbs of Damascus on Aug. 21. How do we know he knows? Simple: It\u2019s \u201cTrust me\u201d once again.<\/p>\n
Did you not watch Kerry’s bravura performance before the TV cameras on Friday when he hawked the dubious evidence against the Syrian government? Someone should tell Kerry that using the word \u201cknow\u201d 35 times does not suffice to dispel well-founded doubts and continuing ambiguities about the \u201cintelligence,\u201d such as it is. The administration\u2019s white paper, issued to support Kerry\u2019s \u201cknowledge,\u201d didn\u2019t provide a single verifiable fact that established Syrian government guilt. [See Consortiumnews.com\u2019s \u201cA Dodgy Dossier on Syrian War<\/a>.\u201d]<\/p>\n But with his bravado, Kerry\u2019s ploy was obvious \u2013 to sweep aside serious questions about the evidence and move the discussion simply to one of how much punishment should be inflicted on Syria. \u201cSo now that we know what we know, the question … is: What will we do?\u201d Kerry said Friday.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But, Mr. Kerry, please not so fast with your attempt to do an Iraq War number on us. Frankly, asking us to simply trust you (especially after your 2002 vote for President George W. Bush\u2019s Iraq War resolution) is too much to ask. Given the disease of prevarication circulating like a virus among top intelligence officials, one would have to have been \u201cborn yesterday\u201d (to use one of Harry Truman\u2019s expressions) to take you at your word.<\/p>\n And, there are hopeful signs that Congress, which has been fooled more than once before, may see through this latest rush to judgment. “Yes, I saw the classified documents,\u201d Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, told The Hill newspaper<\/a>. \u201cThey were pretty thin.”<\/p>\n Some lawmakers are even stating another obvious point; i.e., that even with congressional approval, a military strike on Syria would be not only an international crime, but also unconstitutional because of the Constitution\u2019s supremacy clause making treaties the supreme law of the land.<\/p>\n Under the United Nations Treaty, signatories like the U.S. pledge not to use \u2013 or even threaten to use \u2013 military force against another nation without U.N. Security Council approval or unless already attacked or in imminent danger of attack. None of those conditions apply here.<\/p>\n So, even if the \u201cintelligence\u201d against Syria were air-tight (which it isn\u2019t) and if Congress approves a use-of-force resolution, the U.S. Constitution still requires that we abide by the U.N. Treaty and obtain Security Council approval. How can lawyers like Obama and Kerry ignore such basics?<\/p>\n There are also other options for punishing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad if there\u2019s real evidence that he was complicit in the Aug. 21 attack. Like other leaders accused of war crimes, he can be indicted by the International Criminal Court or subjected to a special war-crimes tribunal. Yet, instead of following those legal strategies, which are specifically designed for these sorts of situations, President Obama proposes punishing one alleged war crime by committing another.<\/p>\n Intelligence? A Sow\u2019s Ear<\/strong><\/p>\n But there remains the key question of establishing the Assad government’s guilt and whether the Obama administration\u2019s \u201chigh-confidence\u201d assessment about that point is justified. It is a time-honored (or, better, time-dishonored) custom for White House officials bent on war to distort or even manufacture \u201cintelligence\u201d to justify their aims, especially after they’ve gone public with their “knowledge.”<\/p>\n On this point, I can say \u2013 \u201cwith high confidence\u201d \u2013 that the White House is at it again, perpetrating another fraud on Congress and the American people. And most of the U.S. mainstream press has elbowed past the many questions about the quality of the intelligence and has moved on to discussing whether President Obama will \u201cwin\u201d or \u201close\u201d the congressional vote, whether partisanship will spill over into foreign policy hurting America’s \u201ccredibility\u201d to look tough.<\/p>\n Was it just a little over a decade ago that we watched President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney create out of whole cloth intelligence to \u201cjustify\u201d war on Iraq while the U.S. press corps mostly acted as stenographers and cheerleaders? Mistakes are forgivable; fraud is not; neither is cowardice in the face of a misguided rush to war. And the fact that not a single senior Bush administration official was held accountable compounds the problem.<\/p>\n Since many Americans, malnourished as they are by the corporate media, need to be reminded, let\u2019s say it again: The pre-Iraq \u201cintelligence\u201d was not mistaken; it was fraudulent. And, sad to say, then-CIA Director George Tenet and his malleable managers were willing accomplices in that fraud. You need not take my word for it.<\/p>\n Just five years ago, in June 2008, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, announced the conclusions of a five-year committee investigation into pre-Iraq War intelligence approved by a bipartisan majority of 10-5 (Republican Senators Chuck Hagel and Olympia Snowe voting with the Democratic majority).<\/p>\n Emphasizing the committee\u2019s conclusion that the Bush administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence, Rockefeller declared, \u201cIn making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.\u201d<\/p>\n Pressure on Intelligence Analysts<\/strong><\/p>\n My former CIA analyst colleague, Paul R. Pillar, who, as National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East before the attack on Iraq, experienced up-front and personal the extreme pressure that intelligence analysts feel when a president has decided to make war, addressed this problem recently in \u201cThe Risk of Distorting Intelligence.<\/a>\u201d Pillar pointed out that an Associated Press story on the Obama administration\u2019s preparation of the public for a military strike on Syria included these statements:<\/p>\n \u201cThe White House ideally wants intelligence that links the attack [with chemical weapons] directly to Assad or someone in his inner circle, to rule out the possibility that a rogue element of the military act[ed] without Assad\u2019s authorization. That quest for added intelligence has delayed the release of the report by the Office of the Director for National Intelligence laying out evidence against Assad. \u2026 The CIA and the Pentagon have been working to gather more human intelligence tying Assad to the attack.\u201d<\/p>\n Pillar adds, \u201cWhen one hears that policy-makers want not just intelligence on a particular subject but intelligence that supports a particular conclusion about that subject, antennae ought to go up. A \u2018quest\u2019 for conclusion-bolstering material is fundamentally different from an open-minded use of intelligence to inform policy decisions yet to be made. It is instead a matter of making a public (and Congressional) case to support a decision already made.\u201d<\/p>\n This was the kind of highly politicized “policy kitchen” in which intelligence analysts and other officials were pressured to serve as cooks whipping up the frothy broth labeled \u201cGovernment Assessment of the Syrian Government\u2019s Use of Chemical Weapons,\u201d lauded by Secretary of State Kerry on Friday. The manner in which it was issued shows it to be a \u201cpolicy statement,\u201d NOT an \u201cintelligence summary,\u201d as widely described in the media. And, clearly, there were too many cooks involved.<\/p>\n In contrast to key past issuances of similarly high political sensitivity, the \u201cGovernment Assessment\u201d released on Friday does not appear under the letterhead of the Director of National Intelligence as was the case, for example, with the official statement<\/a> issued on Sept. 28, 2012, \u201con the intelligence related to the terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.\u201d<\/p>\n This break in customary practice may have been simply a function of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper being in such bad odor among those lawmakers who still care about truth. Clapper has confessed to telling Congress, under oath, \u201cclearly erroneous\u201d things about the National Security Agency’s surveillance abuses.<\/p>\n Thus, the administration runs some risk in trotting out Clapper this week to testify before the intelligence and national security committees of Congress. Perhaps the White House has decided it has to rely on Clapper\u2019s demonstrated gift for lying with a straight face (though sweaty pate); or it may be counting on short-term memory loss on the part of the many superannuated and\/or distracted members of Congress.<\/p>\n Clapper\u2019s Record<\/strong><\/p>\n Well before Obama appointed him Director of National Intelligence three years ago, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper showed himself to be a subscriber to the George Tenet doctrine of compliant malleability, having helped Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld falsify the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Did no one tell Obama about Clapper\u2019s key role in the cooking of intelligence before the Iraq War?<\/p>\n Rumsfeld handpicked Clapper to be the first civilian director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), where he served during the crucial period of September 2001 to June 2006. NGA\u2019s responsibilities included analysis of satellite imagery \u2013 the most capable and likely collection resource to discover weapons of mass destruction facilities in Iraq or to verify Iraqi \u201cdefector\u201d reports of hidden WMD caches.<\/p>\n So why didn\u2019t NGA point out the absence of WMD evidence or note the many discrepancies in the stories being told by the \u201cdefectors\u201d \u2013 many of whom were coached by the pro-invasion Iraqi National Congress? The answer: Clapper knew which side his bread was buttered on. Instead of speaking truth to power, he not only fell in with the Tenet school of obeisance, but also glommed onto Donald Rumsfeld\u2019s aphorism: \u201cThe absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.\u201d<\/p>\n Working for Rumsfeld, Clapper\u2019s job, pure and simple, was to stifle any untutored-to-the-ways-of-Washington analyst who might ask unwelcome questions like: Could the reason there is not a trace of Iraqi WMD in any of the satellite imagery be that there is none there \u2013 and that the Pentagon\u2019s favorite \u201cdefectors\u201d are lying through their teeth?<\/p>\n When no WMD caches were found, it was Clapper who suggested, without a shred of evidence, that Saddam Hussein had sent the phantom WMD to Syria, a theory that also was pushed by neocons both to deflect criticism of their false assurances about Iraq\u2019s WMD and to open a new military front against another Israeli nemesis, Syria. (It appears that time may have finally come.)<\/p>\n On more substantive issues \u2013 like the key one, \u201cwhy they hate us\u201d \u2013 Clapper has advanced some imaginative theories about what makes terrorists tick. It\u2019s \u201cself-radicalization,\u201d you see. Clapper promoted this bedeviling concept while a nominee for the post of Director of National Intelligence, which he \u2013 having played fast and loose with the truth, aside \u2013 still occupies.<\/p>\n At his nomination hearing Clapper was asked by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida, about lessons drawn from the investigation of Army Major Nidal Hasan, the psychiatrist sentenced to death last week for killing 13 people at Fort Hood. Clapper responded that \u201cself-radicalization\u201d is a \u201cdaunting challenge. \u2026 I don\u2019t have the answer to the challenge; identification of self-radicalization may not lend itself to detection by intelligence agencies. \u2026 It\u2019s almost like detecting tendencies for suicide ahead of time.\u201d<\/p>\n Still Far From a Silk Purse<\/strong><\/p>\n If intelligence community leaders have any pride left, they may also have been embarrassed by how last Friday\u2019s \u201cGovernment Assessment\u201d fit the old bureaucratic image of a camel as the arch-typical horse designed by committee. Seldom have my intelligence alumni colleagues and I seen a more meandering, repetitive, fulsome document. Full of verisimilitude, the document nonetheless includes this key acknowledgment: \u201cOur high confidence assessment is the strongest position that the U.S. Intelligence can take short of confirmation.\u201d<\/p>\n It seems a safe bet that during the next two weeks\u2019 testimony before the various national security committees of the Senate and House, Kerry and Clapper will claim that additional intelligence has \u201cconfirmed\u201d what until now has been simply the \u201cassessments\u201d of the U.S. government. Let\u2019s hope that lawmakers have the good sense to ask for actual evidence that can withstand independent scrutiny.<\/p>\n Colin Powell\u2019s meretricious U.N. speech on Feb. 5, 2003, was at least well crafted and persuasively presented. In a same-day assessment, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) gave him an A for presentation, while almost flunking him (with a C-minus) for substance. In our Memorandum for the President<\/a> that day, we urged that the discussion be widened beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we saw no compelling reason and from which we believed the unintended consequences were likely to be catastrophic.<\/p>\n If President Obama would let us in the door, we would tell him the same thing today, since he has surrounded himself with a menagerie of \u201ctough guys and gals\u201d as well as some neocons and neocons-lite. Before Kerry went on TV Friday, VIPS had already warned<\/a> Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey \u201cthere are serious problems with the provenance and nature of the ‘intelligence’ that is being used to support the need for military action.\u201d Those problems remain.<\/p>\n Tonkin Gulf<\/strong><\/p>\n From my only personal life experience, there was another good example of how the prostitution of intelligence works: When the Tonkin Gulf incident (used to \u201cjustify\u201d the Vietnam War) took place 49 years ago, I was a journeyman CIA analyst in what Condoleezza Rice has called \u201cthe bowels of the agency.\u201d As an intelligence analyst responsible for Russian policy toward Southeast Asia and China, I worked very closely with those doing analysis on Vietnam and China.<\/p>\n At the time, the U.S. had about 16,000 troops in South Vietnam, but there was mounting political pressure to dramatically expand the U.S. troop levels to prevent a Communist victory. President Lyndon Johnson feared that Republicans would blame him for \u201closing Vietnam\u201d the way some tarred Harry Truman for \u201closing China.\u201d So the Gulf of Tonkin incident \u2013 North Vietnamese allegedly firing on a U.S. destroyer in international waters \u2013 offered Johnson the chance both to look tough and to get a congressional carte blanche for a wider war.<\/p>\n Those of us in intelligence \u2013 not to mention President Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy \u2013 knew full well that the evidence of any North Vietnamese attack on the evening of Aug. 4, 1964, the so-called \u201csecond\u201d Tonkin Gulf incident, was highly dubious.<\/p>\n But it fit the President\u2019s purposes. The North Vietnamese could be presented as aggressors attacking a U.S. ship on a routine patrol in international waters. To make the scam work, however, the American people and members of Congress had to be kept in the dark about the actual facts of the case, all the better to whip them into a war frenzy.<\/p>\n Only years later was the fuller story revealed. During the summer of 1964, President Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were eager to widen the war in Vietnam. They stepped up sabotage and hit-and-run attacks on the coast of North Vietnam. Defense Secretary McNamara later admitted that he and other senior leaders had concluded that the seaborne attacks \u201camounted to little more than pinpricks\u201d and \u201cwere essentially worthless,\u201d but they continued.<\/p>\n Concurrently, the National Security Agency was ordered to collect signals intelligence from the North Vietnamese coast on the Gulf of Tonkin, and the coastal attacks were seen as a helpful way to get the North Vietnamese to turn on their coastal radars. The destroyer USS Maddox, carrying electronic spying gear, was authorized to approach as close as eight miles from the coast and four miles from offshore islands, some of which already had been subjected to intense shelling by clandestine attack boats.<\/p>\n