Tag Archives: Liberty Security & the Law

Out of control

(Washington, D.C.): Sen. Jesse Helms once famously complained that the problem with the State Department is simple. With all its “country desks” (whose job usually seems to be to represent the interests of their respective nations during U.S. policy-making deliberations), the Department is missing one: the American desk. As a result, the view from Foggy Bottom is all too often not what is best for the United States but what will maintain our cordial relations with other countries, generally on their terms.


‘Vision Thing’


Well, we could sure use an American desk at the State Department right now. In its absence, unless President Bush gets personally involved, the Department’s lawyers representing the strongly held views of some foreign governments are going to get some U.S. GIs killed, and probably compel them unnecessarily to kill Iraqis and perhaps others, in this War for the Free World.


Here’s the background. In the early 1990s, Mr. Bush’s father decided he was going to rid the world of all chemical weapons. The result was the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) that purported to do just that. At the time, even its supporters acknowledged that the CWC was unverifiable and unlikely to be faithfully implemented by all its parties (notably, the Russians and Chinese) – to say nothing of nations like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq who declined to sign up.


Still, President George H.W. Bush wanted such a treaty. So the rest of the government went along, including the U.S. military. The Pentagon was only too happy to get rid of a vast stockpile of obsolete, largely unusable and increasingly dangerous chemical munitions on the pretext that our potential adversaries would not have such weapons, either.


Riot Control Agents


While the armed services were willing to go that far, there was a show-stopper as far as they were concerned. They balked at the insistence of some of our negotiating partners (including some of our European allies) to the effect that the Chemical Weapons Convention had to ban the use of riot control agents (RCAs), as well. That is a fancy term for non-lethal substances like tear gas.


Now, police forces all across America wouldn’t dream of being without tear gas, pepper spray and the like. They understand that the use of such agents can enable the authorities to control an ugly situation with a minimum of violence. In their absence, lethal force might have to be used in circumstances where that would not only be undesirable, but possibly highly counterproductive.


Such products have also long been marketed to consumers in this country for personal protection. Communities that do not allow their residents to carry guns recognize that little canisters of these non-lethal agents are legitimate means of self-defense. They are sufficiently domesticated that you can buy ones that can be clipped onto a key chain or put in a purse.


Just don’t try putting their military counterpart in the kit bags of our troops in dangerous places like Iraq or Afghanistan. Why? Because the U.S. State Department has decided that the use of RCAs by our forces in the field would violate the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention.


An ‘Unacceptable Price to Pay for a CWC’


Never mind that the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell – who subsequently would, himself, push cookies at the State Department for the incumbent President Bush – laid down the law to his father: In 1992, as the CWC was being negotiated, Gen. Powell declared: “Non-lethal riot control agents provide a morally correct option to achieve defensive military objectives without having to resort to the unnecessary loss of innocent lives. Sacrificing such an option would be an unacceptable price to pay for a CW treaty.”


This position was formally endorsed by Bush ’41. Even though the Convention prohibits “the use of riot control agents as a method of warfare,” George Herbert Walker Bush made clear that he interpreted that obligation to be consistent with then-existing U.S. policy dating back to the Ford Administration, which permitted the defensive use of RCAs in four different contexts “to save lives.”


It is instructive to see what the State Department lawyers are now arguing our troops can’t do, despite the following applications approved in Mr. Ford’s Executive Order 11850:


“(a) Use of riot control agents in riot control situations in areas under direct and distinct U.S. military control, to include controlling rioting prisoners of war.
“(b) Use of riot control agents in situations in which civilians are used to mask or screen attacks and civilian casualties can be reduced or avoided.
“(c) Use of riot control agents in rescue missions in remotely isolated areas, of downed aircrews and passengers, and escaping prisoners.
“(d) Use of riot control agents in rear echelon areas outside the zone of immediate combat to protect convoys from civil disturbances, terrorists and paramilitary organizations.”


In due course, Bill Clinton accepted this formulation, as well, when it became a non-negotiable Senate precondition for approval of the CWC. And it was enshrined in the resolution of ratification that body ultimately adopted.


Never mind. The American-desk-free State Department insists the U.S. military would be violating the Chemical Weapons Convention if it uses RCAs. As a result, it is not doing so. And State’s lawyers are adamantly resisting executive or legislative branch efforts (the latter being well led by Sen. John Ensign, Republican of Nevada) that would show them to be dead wrong.


The Bottom Line


The question is: How many GIs and/or innocent civilians are going to have to wind up unnecessarily dead because the riot-control agents that might have saved their lives couldn’t be used, thanks to some out-of-control State Department lawyers?


 

Mugged liberal

In announcing last week a sweeping crackdown in Britain on the "evil ideology" of coming to be known as Islamofascism, Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that "the rules of the game have changed." So, it would appear has he.

In fact, Mr. Blair has become an exemplar of the old adage that a "conservative is a liberal who has been mugged." The two bombing attacks on London’s mass-transit systems, perpetrated mostly by home-grown Islamist suicide bombers (actual or would-be), not only mugged Britain’s recently reelected leader, but his country, as well.

The New Blair

As a result, Tony Blair appears to have broad popular support for abandoning his past, disastrous political correctness – a stance he had clung to even after the September 11th hijackers mugged a great many American liberals (at least temporarily). Gone was his previous commitment to allow Islamist communities to operate impunity in Britain, even those that made no secret of their sympathies with and support for terror. (The extent to which Islamofascists cynically took advantage of this tolerant attitude was evident in an undercover journalist’s chilling account published on August 7 by the Sunday Times of London under the headline "While London reeled under attack, the teachers of extremism were celebrating – and a Sunday Times reporter was recording every word.")

By contrast, on August 5, the Prime Minister announced that he was "absolutely and completely committed" to ensuring that those foreign clerics and others who come to Britain and condone, glorify or justify terrorism are deported. Ditto those "actively engaged" with websites, bookshops, networks and organizations considered to be inciting hatred. Two such organizations, the radical Islamofascist Al Mujahiroun and its successor, Hizb-ut-Tahira, were proscribed. Mosques where such activities are allowed to take place will be shut down. Asylum will no longer be granted terrorists or their sympathizers. And British nationals engaging in speech that promotes terror risk being stripped of their citizenship and deported or incarcerated.

Suffice it to say, Tony Blair’s mugged-liberal response to terror attacks in the United Kingdom makes the USA Patriot Act look like the ACLU’s fondest dream. It is also a reminder of the sorts of infringements on civil liberties that may be demanded by Americans if the Patriot Act were not to be renewed and/or terrorists succeed in attacking this country again with devastating effect.

Incipient ‘Mugging’

Unfortunately, if Mr. Blair has had an epiphany about the gravity of his past underestimation of the danger posed by Islamofascism at home, he seems as yet unwilling (or perhaps, given his domestic preoccupations at the moment, simply unable) to recognize the ominous implications of the errors of his ways abroad. Specifically, even as the Prime Minister is trying to shut down the safe haven for terror he and his predecessors have permitted in Britain, he continues to insist that a new safe haven be afforded them in the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank.

Indeed, Tony Blair’s fixation with the creation of a Palestinian state that will, inevitably, become an Islamofascist breeding ground and base of operations is of a piece with the political and strategic miscalculations that animated his indulgence of Islamists in the UK. To demonstrate that he was not George Bush’s "poodle" on foreign policy, to appease his party’s vehemently anti-Iraq leftist majority and to pander to anti-West Muslims in places like Leeds, London, Birmingham and overseas, Mr. Blair has insisted on the early establishment of a sovereign "Palestine."

The Prime Minister evidently remains untroubled that the bitter fruit of his efforts in the so-called Quartet – the diplomatic equivalent of gang rape involving the European Union, the United Nations, Russia and the United States teamed up to stick it to Israel – will be the creation of yet another Islamofascist state-sponsor of terror in the Middle East.

For example, Mr. Blair has insisted that the "Road Map" be followed to create a Palestinian state, with none of the caveats or safeguards President Bush enunciated in June 2002. At the Gleneagles G-8 meeting last month, Mr. Blair also forced through a multinational commitment to provide $3 billion to the Palestinian Authority (PA). And British pressure is at work in the U.S. government’s insistence that Israel provide arms to the PA – even though the U.S. envoy in charge of this project, Army Lieutenant Gen. William Ward, admitted to Congress in July that he had no idea what had happened to the thousands of M-16s Israel had previously given the Palestinian pursuant to the Oslo Accords. (At Gen. Ward’s hearing before the House Foreign Operations Subcommittee, Rep. Mark Kirk, Republican of Illinois, noted sarcastically, "Imagine how we felt a year later when we saw Palestinian policemen using those M-16s to shoot Israelis.")

The Bottom Line

The evidence is now unmistakable. Tony Blair is as wrong about the foreseeable prospects for Palestine as he was, pre-mugging, about the wisdom of ignoring Islamofascism in Britain. Islamists will soon hold unchallenged sway over Gaza and parts of the West Bank, rightly claiming that their terror forced Israel to withdraw and that its continuation will result, in due course, in the "liberation" of the rest of the "occupied" territory (meaning all of Israel).

Mr. Blair has long been courageous and visionary on Iraq and Afghanistan. Lately, he has become so with respect to the terrorist footprint in Britain. It is in the interest of all freedom-loving people that he and President Bush act now to prevent a worse "mugging" by far and encourage Israel to suspend its impending, ominous retreat in the face of Palestinian terror.

 

Saudi double games

Within days of the murderous 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush declared before a joint session of Congress: "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."

Unfortunately, under the leadership of King Fahd (actual or nominal), Saudi Arabia demonstrated that it was possible to be with us and with the terrorists. Far from being regarded as a hostile regime, the United States has described the Saudi government as a valued "partner" in the war on terror, notwithstanding abundant evidence that it continues to harbor and support terrorism around the world – including inside the United States.

Indeed, under Fahd, whose death was officially announced on Monday (although he has been effectively incapacitated for years following a severe stroke), the Saudis perfected their double game: simultaneously being considered in Washington a friend of America while behaving all over the world as a supporter and financier of America’s enemies.

Friends like These

A recitation of the evidence of Saudi solidarity with the United States usually starts with King Fahd’s decision to allow American forces to use his territory to liberate Kuwait in 1991. Typically, it claims Saudi Arabia’s cooperation on oil pricing. Some also point to the Saudis’ assistance to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement in counterterrorism efforts post-9/11.

In fact, what the deployment of U.S. troops on Saudi soil in Operation Desert Shield amounted to was allowing us to defend them. When it has suited the Saudis to have cheaper oil – notably, when it looked (briefly) as though we might actually get serious about alternative energy sources – they forced prices down. When it has not, the Saudis have been fully prepared to help the OPEC cartel drive them up (including today when a barrel of oil it costs them at most two or three dollars to extract sells for nearly $60).

It is true that the Saudi royal family has lately become more concerned about its hold on power in the face of terror attacks inside the kingdom. Such concerns may produce a greater degree of mutuality of interest with the United States as relates to countering terrorist operations within Saudi Arabia. Even there, however, the transparency has been limited, as with, for example, American access to terror suspects in Saudi custody.

Far more important is the litany of things the Saudis have done – and continue to do – that encourage and enable terrorism against those (Muslim and non-Muslim alike) who do not embrace the ideology of the Saudi Islamofascist cult known as Wahhabism. A short list of these unfriendly activities includes the following:

  • Providing financial, organizational, logistical and other support for terrorists like Osama bin Laden. While the Saudi leadership doesn’t want al Qaeda to launch any more attacks inside the kingdom, there is reason to believe that at least some among the 5,000 princes think underwriting its attacks elsewhere is the best way to prevent them at home.
  • Founding and running Wahhabi Islamofascist hate-factories in mosques and their associated schools (madrassas) all over the world. The Saudi-financed madrassas of Pakistan have been getting a lot of attention after British authorities identified them as places where the Leeds suicide bombers trained.

A superb study released in January by Freedom House documented that the Saudi government is also using American mosques – by some estimates 80% of which have their mortgages held by Saudi Arabian financial institutions – to promote jihad. Materials officially produced and disseminated to such mosques by the kingdom are filled with calls to hate Christians and Jews. Those who fail to conform are threatened with violent punishment as apostates. Saudi-trained and -selected clerics serve as enforcers in our mosques and in our prisons and military as recruiters for a rabidly anti-American Wahhabi creed.

  • Since the Saudi-engineered oil price spikes of the 1970s, the Saudis have also spent untold sums (they acknowledge expending some $80 billion in "foreign aid"; the actual total amount is surely far higher) building up a worldwide infrastructure of charities, businesses and front organizations. In the wake of the London bombings, several of these Saudi-backed front organizations have found it necessary to issue fatwas in Britain and the United States that purport to denounce terror.

More Double Games

As noted terrorism expert Stephen Emerson has reported ( www.investigativeproject.org/FCNA-CAIR.html), however, some of these groups and individuals associated with them have been prominent supporters of – or, at the very least, apologists for – terrorist organizations. For example, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which organized a press conference to promote the U.S. version of the phony fatwa, has had no fewer than four of its associates convicted of providing financial or other forms of material support to terrorists.

It is no small irony that the new Saudi ambassador to the United States is a man who exemplifies his country’s double game on terrorism: Prince Turki al-Faisal. For roughly twenty-five years, Turki was in charge of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence operations. In that capacity, he was intimately familiar both with his country’s efforts to promote Wahhabism (including supporting bin Laden’s operations in Afghanistan) and its counterterrorism cooperation with the United States.

The Bottom Line

King Fahd’s death, the mounting evidence of the danger posed by ongoing Saudi support for terror and the assignment to Washington of one of the kingdom’s most experienced double-gamers should require Saudi Arabia finally to do what President Bush demanded nearly four years ago: The Saudis can no longer be with us and against us. They must be made to choose.

 

Convicted!

Despite a string of legal decisions that have debilitated America’s ability to prosecute successfully the War on Terror, a ray of hope has emerged. New York defense attorney Lynne Stewart was convicted Thursday of aiding terrorism by helping her client – Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman – send messages to militant followers (Abdel-Rahman, it can be recalled, was found guilty in 1995 of involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing).

Likely facing 20 years in prison, Stewart was convicted on all five counts against her: aiding terrorist activity, conspiring to assist terrorist activity and actually assisting terrorist activity, as well as defrauding the government by breaking her pledge to keep her client from communicating with the outside world and making false statements.

Stewart’s case, hopefully, will prove a powerful deterrent to others who would abet terrorism under the expectation of protection from a sympathetic legal system. Justice has had its day in court.

CAIR’s double standard

The mentality of radical Islam includes several main components, of which one is Muslim supremacism – a belief that believers alone should rule and otherwise enjoy an exalted status over non-Muslims. This outlook dominates the Islamist worldview as much in the elegant streets of Paris as in the rude caves of Afghanistan.

Two recent American criminal cases highlight this attribute. Both involve the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Saudi-funded group whose leadership sometimes announces its goal to Islamize the United States (“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant”).

The first criminal case concerns Dale T. Ehrgott, a non-Muslim insurance broker living in Reno, Nevada. Appalled by CAIR’s record of apologizing for terrorism, plus the then-recent arrest on terrorism-related charges of its former employee Ismail Royer, Ehrgott dashed off four angry e-mails to CAIR in mid-2003.

One read: “We accept you [sic.] holy war. Looking forward to it very much. We can deal with you easily especially since you are on our soil. You have taught us much about terrorism so get ready to be the receiver.” In another message, some weeks later, he wrote: “You are making a lot of people angry and you idiots are sitting ducks.”

“It wasn’t a threat, just a nasty e-mail,” Ehrgott told The Associated Press. He described CAIR as “an anti-American organization” and points out that at no time did he physically intimidate it. CAIR saw matters differently and forwarded the notes to law enforcement, which came down heavily on Ehrgott, perhaps because the Department of Justice decided to make an example of him.

Describing these e-mails as containing “a threat to injure members” of CAIR, the U.S. attorney for Nevada, Daniel Bogden, convinced a federal grand jury in March 2004 to indict Ehrgott. Bogden then threw the book at Ehrgott, who, if convicted, faced up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

But after his September 2004 trial ended in a hung jury, the feds abruptly lost their taste for prosecuting Ehrgott. They settled with him on Jan. 13, letting him off with a trivial sentence – one year’s probation and fifty hours of community service, implicitly acknowledging that he had acted rashly but not dangerously.

The second case concerns Taiser Hosien Okashah, a Muslim food broker (and an illegal immigrant from Syria) living in Miami Beach. On June 3, 2004, Okashah threatened to destroy Best Buy store in Plantation, Florida, because, according to the store clerk’s sworn testimony, he was displeased with a rebate offer on a laptop computer. “I am going to come back and blow up this place if I do not get my money this time,” the clerk quotes him saying. On June 29, the authorities arrested Okashah, charged him with threatening to detonate an explosive, and briefly jailed him without bond.

Altaf Ali, executive director of CAIR’s Florida office, leapt to Okashah’s defense. Muslims, he said, are “very concerned that a very humble member of the community, for asking a question about a rebate, can be put in jail.” Ali attributed Okashah’s travails to a miscommunication exacerbated by the negative stereotyping of Muslims. A CAIR press release further specified that the arrest stemmed from “language barriers and over-reactions by store employees and law enforcement officials.”

Ali also sought to have the judge in the case removed because he had ordered Okashah to undergo a psychological evaluation. Nonetheless, Okashah is scheduled to go to trial on Feb. 14, for the second-degree felony charge of “threatening to detonate an explosive device.”

In CAIR’s eyes, then, when a non-Muslim broker responds too emotionally to terrorism, he deserves years in jail and financial ruin. But when a Muslim broker threatens a store, he’s the innocent victim of “negative stereotyping” who deserves release without any punishment at all.

The Ehrgott and Okashah incidents fit an ugly Islamist pattern of double standards. Although CAIR presents itself as a civil-rights group, it is just the opposite – an organization asserting special privileges for Muslims and derogating the rights of others.

When Western institutions grant legitimacy to Islamist organizations like CAIR they strengthen Islamist supremacism and its drive for Muslim dominance. Those institutions need to get smart and retract that legitimacy, reserving it for Muslims who reject radical Islam.

 

Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

A treaty with al Qaeda?

In a recent column for National Review Online, Andrew C. McCarthy pointedly asks: "Should we make a treaty with al Qaeda?" The question comes as Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales faces harsh criticism from Senate Democrats for his role in formulating the administration’s policy that denies Geneva Conventions’ protections to captured terrorists.

The author recounts how al Qaeda terrorists, "in addition to killing civilians in sneak attacks…also secrete themselves among their once and future victims. They wear no distinguishing insignia to segregate themselves as a militia. They use mosques and schools and hospitals to plan and store weaponry. They feign surrender and then open fire on unsuspecting coalition forces attempting the civilized act of detaining, rather than shooting, them. As for treatment of their own detainees, their practice ranges from execution-style homicide to beastly beheading – usually captured on film and circulated on the Internet to buck up the other savages while scaring the living hell out of everyone else."

Al Qaeda, McCarthy continues, "is not and, indeed, cannot be among Geneva’s high contracting parties. It is not a country." Furthermore, "The U.S. has for over two decades expressly rejected a treaty – the 1977 Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions – that would have vested terrorists with Geneva protections….if we’re going to have such a treaty with al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, it will have to be a new one."

Thus, McCarthy asks of Gonzales’ Senate critics, "so the folks back home know just where you stand: Do you favor a treaty with al Qaeda?"

Kill (the) bill

(Washington, D.C.): The philosopher George Santayana once said that “fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.” By that definition, it appears there is an outbreak of fanaticism in official Washington at the moment as proponents of the so-called “intelligence reform bill” insist that it be enacted this week – even though, in at least two important ways, that bill is no longer conducive to the aim of reducing America’s vulnerability to renewed terrorist attack.

Remember, It’s the 9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act

First, the bill was not supposed to be aimed just at reforming intelligence. Instead, it was intended to implement the various recommendations of the 9/11 Commission – including a number that did not deal with changes to the U.S. intelligence community.

In fact, arguably far more important in terms of actually reducing the chances of another terrorist attack on the American homeland are a set of Commission recommendations that some in the Congress have no interest in adopting. These pertain to border security, changes to policies and practices governing legal and illegal immigration and standards designed to make state-issued drivers licenses less susceptible to fraud and abuse.

What the 9/11 Families Really Want

Five members of 9/11 Families for a Secure America appeared at a Capitol Hill press conference last week to urge that the bill not be enacted in its present form. Their group represents some 300 of the families who lost loved ones on September 11th – far more than any other group and most especially the handful of self-appointed spokesmen who call themselves the “9/11 Family Steering Committee” who campaigned for John Kerry and now insist that the bill be enacted as is.

It turns out that vastly more of those whose lives were shattered by the terrorists on 9/11 recognize a political certitude: If the present legislation does not include measures to make our borders less porous, to improve the government’s ability to monitor aliens who are in this country legally and to remove those who are not and to prevent terrorists’ ability to engage in identity and document fraud, such provisions will likely never pass.

The truth of the matter is that, although polls indicate the vast majority of Americans want more robust policies towards illegal aliens, leading politicians of both parties choose to ignore the preferences of such constituents. Instead, they defer to those who advocate on the illegals’ behalf – notably, well-heeled immigration lawyers, prominent Latino organizations and various industries whose profits depend upon the exploitation of cheap labor.

Consequently, all other things being equal, if any bills dealing with immigration issues are actually taken up next year, they will likely be about “legalizing” aliens who have come here without permission. Whether it is called amnesty or not, that will be the perceived purpose. And the mere prospect of such legislation will have the effect of creating new incentives to gain access to and/or remain in this country illegally – exactly the opposite of what the 9/11 Commission had in mind, and sure to compound the illegal activities that made possible the last terrorist attacks.

The only chance to do something constructive about borders, immigration and drivers licenses and other document security is if these elements are embedded in must-pass 911 legislation. Were elected officials allowed to get away with claiming that their bill rewiring the Intelligence Community’s organizational chart is the only necessary response to the Commission’s recommendations, you can forget about getting action on the other, critically important front. House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner and those of his colleagues who are not interested simply in paying lip service to the idea of “making the American people safer” but actually doing so, understand this reality and must be supported in holding the line.

Do No Harm

The second argument for killing the present bill is that its changes to U.S. intelligence will likely make matters worse, not better. It will create more bureaucracy and more “stove-piping,” actions that are likely to produce more “groupthink” and less timely and actionable intelligence. These are precisely the things the reformers say they want to avoid and that we can ill-afford during a time of war.

In addition, the bill’s drafters explicitly set out to create new chains of command for the Defense Department’s intelligence agencies. No one – least of all House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter – should be under any illusion that presidential assurances, or minor changes in language will correct what is a fundamental flaw in this legislation, one that is likely to cause real harm to our men and women in uniform.

It is instructive that the bill’s proponents are currently trying to reduce these highly momentous disagreements over substance to nothing more than a political power play. They would have us believe that President Bush’s legacy or his prospects for future legislative accomplishments depend on his forcing this defective legislation through Congress in the next few days. Such gambits simply underscore the need for more time to consider and improve this legislation’s contents.

The Bottom Line

Legislators have no higher obligation than to make our country truly safer. If there is a significant danger that they will not actually be advancing that aim in a piece of legislation, it is incumbent on them to address the identified defects in a careful and deliberate manner — something that is not possible in the last hours of a lame duck session.

The American people want and expect their elected officials not simply to get this bill done, but to get it done right. True presidential leadership will be demonstrated by a recognition that the latter can only be accomplished next year.

Why US Intelligence is Inadequate

By Angelo M. Codevilla

Dr. Codevilla is a professor of international relations at Boston University, a fellow of the Claremont Institute and an editor of TAS, was a Foreign Service officer and served on the staff of the US Senate Intelligence Committee between 1977 and 1985. He was the principal author of the 1980 Presidential transition report on intelligence.

Conventional wisdom used to be that US intelligence was the lifeblood of the war on terror. By 2004 no one contested that intelligence, especially the CIA, was at the heart of policies that had failed to stem terrorism and had turned military victory in Iraq into embarrassment. The high level commissions that examined current failures began to suspect that these reflected longstanding, basic faults. They only scratched the surface. In fact US intelligence  in all its functions – collection, quality control (otherwise known as counter intelligence), analysis, and covert action –is hindering America’s war.

The public, accustomed in recent years to stories of botched anti Saddam coups, had learned that CIA covert action works only in the movies. But in the summer of 2004 newspaper readers were shocked by the CIA’s admission to Senate investigators that it had precisely zero agents in Iraq in the years prior to the invasion, because getting and keeping agents in such places is tough. Was it not CIA’s job to have agents in tough places? The attentive public also remembered that the President had struck specific bunkers at the start of the Iraq war because CIA’s most valued sources assured us Saddam was staying there. But US troops inspecting the wreckage had found neither Saddam nor bunkers. Wasn’t CIA supposed to know enough not to help play America for a sucker? The commissions seemed most impressed that CIA had translated scarce and bad information into misleading analyses without dissent. Groupthink, they called it. Voters and taxpayers wonder how an institution in which so many had placed so much trust could suddenly have been found to be such a loser.

To those close to the intelligence business however, such things are an old story.  There never was a golden age of CIA. Its performance against terrorism is not so different from what it was during the Cold War.

 

View the full paper (Web)

View the full paper (PDF)

‘First, do no harm’

(Washington, D.C.): The heat is on. Advocates of history’s most sweeping and least-considered “reform” of the U.S. intelligence community are intent on having their way. In recent days, members of the 9/11 Commission and leading legislators of both parties have taken to the media with a mixture of dire warnings of bad things that will happen if their bill is not passed – and utterly preposterous promises of good things to come if it is.

The former include the claim – mostly advanced by Democrats – that President Bush will be discredited, if not politically emasculated, if he is unable to compel balking Republican members of Congress to enact this legislation. The latter include assertions that passage of the intelligence reform bill is necessary to “keep the American people safe.” The public – 80% of whom we have endlessly been told favor this measure – could reasonably be under the illusion that its adoption will prevent future terrorist attacks against this country.

Of course, none of this is true. Mr. Bush will be strengthened, not hurt – and more importantly, so will the national interest – should he recognize the wisdom of many on Capitol Hill, in the U.S. intelligence community and, yes, inside his own administration who know this bill to be too defective to warrant enactment.

Take, for example, the hotly contested issue of whether the bill’s proposal to reassign management control and budgetary authority for three Defense Department intelligence agencies to a new Director of National Intelligence will impair our military’s operations and security. Rep. Duncan Hunter, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and all the Joint Chiefs of Staff are convinced it will. The bill’s proponents insist it will not, often averring that they would never support legislation that would do such a thing, and suggest that their opponents are motivated by parochial interests.

Enter Dr. Schlesinger

Happily, there is one man in America whose unique credentials allow him to address the matter objectively: James Schlesinger, a former head of the intelligence community and past Secretary of Defense.

Here’s what Dr. Schlesinger – a recipient of the Center’s “Keeper of the Flame” Award – had to say in testimony he gave the Senate Armed Services Committee on August 16th:

“Intelligence is increasingly interwoven with military operations. We must always have in mind the crucial role of intelligence in support of the war fighter. The advance of military technology and its embodiment in our military forces have made intelligence ever more integral to our military strategy and battlefield tactics and to this country’s immense military advantage….In all of this, the accuracy, the immediacy and the believability of intelligence is crucial….

“It has taken many years to persuade military commanders that national assets will reliably be available to them in the event of conflict….To shift control over crucial intelligence assets outside the Department of Defense risks weakening the relative military advantage of the United States – and at the same time creates the incentive to divert resources into (likely inferior) intelligence capabilities, which would further reduce the available forces.”

Dr. Schlesinger concluded his Olympian testimony last August with a call for Congress to “remember Hippocrates’ injunction: ‘First, do no harm.’ In altering the structure of the intelligence community, it is essential to deliberate long and hard – and not to be stampeded into doing harm….Reform may now be necessary. Yet, in the vain pursuit of a perfect intelligence organization, do not shake up intelligence in a way that does do harm – and in pursuit of this will-of-the-wisp, damage in particular those military capabilities that we alone possess.”

Fortunately, this eminently sensible advice to “do no harm” has recently been echoed by two highly influential, yet politically divergent editorial pages. On November 22, the Wall Street Journal observed: “Congress wrapped up its weekend lame-duck session without passing intelligence reform, and you will no doubt be reading outraged editorials and political moans that the country is now less safe. Don’t believe it. The opposite may be closer to the truth, since the proposed reshuffling of the intelligence bureaucracies would have taken months, if not years, to carry out – and certainly would have turned some of our spy agencies’ attention away from the actual collection and analysis of intelligence….If this reform is really so vital, it will get done, but better to do it in more considered fashion next year.”

Then, on November 24, the Washington Post editorialized: “Last weekend, Congress passed up the opportunity to adopt, after scant consideration, the largest reorganization of the U.S. intelligence community in half a century – a measure that was rushed through both houses with election-year zeal and then concocted by a conference committee into a 500-page omnibus that hardly anyone had read, much less considered….A better solution would be to pause, let this election-year stampede subside and urge a new Congress to try again.”

The Bottom Line

Perhaps the real reason some in Congress are so intent on getting “intelligence reform” legislation done now is that consideration of this matter next year would almost certainly require action they are resisting and have not addressed in the current bill: Much-needed streamlining and other improvements in legislative oversight of the intelligence community. That possibility to do real good is another excellent reason for our leaders to avoid doing harm to American intelligence when the lame duck session resumes next week.

Intelligence test

(Washington, D.C.): We may have dodged a bullet. In its post-election lame duck session, the 108th Congress continued to resist intense pressure to approve a bill that purported to fix what ails the U.S. intelligence community (IC). Unless legislators are compelled to return after Thanksgiving for this purpose, the Nation will have been spared a well-intentioned but ultimately counterproductive plan – one that purportedly addresses problems with the IC’s excessive bureaucracy and insufficient competitive intelligence collection and analysis, yet would do so in ways certain to result in more of the former and less of the latter.

Horatii at the Bridge

Thanks for this stay of execution are due principally to three chairmen: the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s General Richard Myers USAF and Duncan Hunter and James Sensenbrenner, leaders respectively of the House Armed Services and House Judiciary Committees. For their courage in the face of intense pressure from the 9/11 Commission and families, the White House, other legislators and the press, these men have earned the this column’s coveted “Horatius at the Bridge” Award, named for the ancient Roman who, according to legend, saved his city by singlehandedly keeping an enemy horde from gaining access to it.

Unlike the centuries-spanning fame earned by Horatius for his feat, those who have recently performed with similar valor have received nothing but harsh criticism. Presumably, this is because advocates of the intelligence reform bill understand a simple reality: The only way their legislation – or at least some of its most dubious provisions – could become law is if Congress were denied the opportunity fully to consider and debate such “reforms.”

‘The System is Broken’

It is no small irony that, at the same moment these Horatii are being castigated for opposing haste-makes-waste legislating, Capitol Hill is in tumult over language contained in another bill – the omnibus appropriations act – that could only have been adopted under similar circumstances. In the latter case, when no one was looking a couple of staffers reportedly inserted a wildly controversial provision affording heretofore unimaginable congressional access to individuals’ IRS tax returns.

The bipartisan sense of outrage over this dark-of-night maneuver was expressed Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” by Senator John McCain, who rightly called it a prime example of how “the [legislative] system is broken.” Unfortunately, the same broken system produced the current 9/11 intelligence reform bill. In both cases, far-reaching decisions about the legislation’s final form were made behind closed doors by literally a handful of Senators, Representatives and staff. In both cases, artificial deadlines and the leadership’s understandable desire to exercise control over the process affords the rest of the Congress scarcely any opportunity even to review what is served up, let alone to propose and adopt needed changes.

Stay of Execution

As a result, had it not been for a warning expressed several weeks ago by Gen. Myers, there is every likelihood that the defective intelligence reform bill would by now have been signed into law. Thanks, however, to the Joint Chiefs chairman’s timely expression of concern about the impact this legislation would have on the timeliness and quality of intelligence provided to America’s war-fighters, that has not happened.

Armed with the Myers’ letter, the Armed Services Committee’s Rep. Hunter redoubled his campaign against, among other provisions, the bill’s transfer of direction and budgetary authority over defense intelligence programs from the Secretary of Defense to a newly created Director of National Intelligence. Some critics have seen in the Myers intervention the hand of current Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, whose head they would like to roll.

The “reformers” find this explanation less inconvenient than the alternative – and far more plausible – one: The apolitical, straight-shooting and Center for Security Policy Keeper of the Flame Award-winning Gen. Myers is persuaded that, from the U.S. military’s point of view, the present legislation is ill-advised, strategically and tactically. To his credit, Gen. Myers has had the guts to speak that truth to power.

Rep. Hunter was joined in his opposition at a decisive meeting Saturday of the House Republican caucus by Rep. Sensenbrenner, who was appalled at the conferees’ decision to remove several provisions added by the House of Representatives. The amendments were designed to counter terrorists seeking via illegal immigration to gain access to, and operate in, this country. A sufficient number of GOP House members agreed with these influential committee chairmen that Speaker Dennis Hastert decided to forego a vote on the bill until, at the earliest, next month.

The Bottom Line

In the days ahead, there will surely be demands that Congress force the intelligence bill through in December. Democrats will argue that doing so will be the sine qua non of bipartisan cooperation: Unless the President imposes lockstep discipline on his party, he is inviting even more aggressive use of obstructionist tactics by theirs. The press will make hay with Mr. Bush’s seeming inability to bend GOP congressional leaders and rank-and-file to his will. And within his own party, some will contend that this legislation is necessary, if not to prevent a future terrorist attack on our homeland, at least to keep Republicans from being blamed for it.

The truth of the matter is very different. The President, the Nation’s security and that of the American people will be better served if intelligence reform is conducted next year in a more deliberative, patient and orderly fashion. We should all be grateful to the three Horatii at the Bridge who made that possible.