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Editorial: The Pathocratic Nature of the Hunt
Harrison Koehli
The term "witch hunt" has become a common phrase in popular political discourse over the past fifty years. We've all heard of the McCarthy era communist witch hunts, where there was supposedly a "red under every bed." The term now stands for an "investigation carried out ostensibly to uncover subversive activities but actually used to harass and undermine those with differing views," as the American Heritage Dictionary puts it. Wikipedia defines it as the "persecution of a perceived enemy (commonly socially non-conformist groups) with extreme prejudice and disregard of actual guilt or innocence."
However, the term has become so popularized that we seem to forget the historical events responsible for its modern usage. What really happened in the witch hunts of the 15th to 17th centuries? How was such a fraud perpetrated throughout the whole of Europe and subsequently the American colonies? A quick look at what we know about this history can provide a stunning mirror to the modern War on Terror, its motivations, and the reality behind a lie that is so big, it seems that only the distance of centuries can make its perpetuation seem possible. (Note: The majority of the research cited below is drawn from Jeffrey B. Russell's "A History of Witchcraft," and the lecture notes of Dr. Wayne Litke.)
Few modern, technologically advanced cultures tend to believe in witches. We do not often picture elderly women riding brooms in the night to assemble for orgies and feasting on Christian babies. This was not always the case. Because of the state of the historical records of the times, the number of people executed for being witches varies from fifty thousand to nine million, by some counts. On the continent it was considered an ecclesiastical crime, and witches were burned at the stake. In England it remained a civil crime, the punishment being hanging.
The power of the inquisition of the Catholic Church was repeatedly authorized in writing, such as the papal bull of Innocent IV in 1252, authorizing the imprisonment of heretics, their torture, execution, and the seizure of their property on minimal evidence. This was two hundred years before the "craze" took hold. Think of the modern Patriot Act and the thousands of "suspected terrorists" being held indefinitely on minimal evidence today.
The so-called "craze" is perhaps the most striking aspect of the phenomenon. How is it that so many people could be convinced in the existence of something that simply did not exist? (I will be discussing modern theories on the hunts shortly.) It turns out they had a few good reasons for their belief, although the existence of witches was not one of them. Some of the accused even came to proclaim their own guilt. Perhaps these individuals suffered from schizophrenia, or perhaps the intense fear and absurdity of their situation drove them to these delusions, but the nuns of Louviers and Loudun even admitted making love to the devil himself. Others confessed 'voluntarily.' That is, they were tortured and then given the choice of confessing or being tortured again. Pierre Vallin, in southern France in 1438, admitted to serving and copulating with the devil for sixty-three years. Isobel Gowdie, in 1662, confessed without torture that she had made a pact with the devil, that she flew, that she changed herself into a cat, and that the devil baptised her with her own blood. Sometimes the 'witches' managed to implicate most of the people they knew, like the case of a group in Lombardy in 1387. Again, think of the modern men and women being held in secret prisons across the globe. Think of their alleged confessions, many of which they subsequently deny after being released as being torture-induced. Think of the obviously crazed Moussaoui and his odd, shape-shifting confession to terrorist acts he had nothing to do with.
Here is an example of the questions asked to suspects in the torture chambers:
How long have you been a witch? Why did you become a witch? How did you become a witch, and what happened on the occasion? What was the name of your master among the evil demons? What was the oath you were forced to render him? What demons and what other humans participated [at the sabbat]? Who are your accomplices in evil?
Notice that guilt is presumed. I have little doubt that the following is an accurate representation of the line of questioning in our modern secret prisons:
How long have you been a terrorist? Why did you become a terrorist? How did you become a member of Al Qaeda, and what happened on the occasion? What was the name of your master among Al Qaeda? What was the oath you were forced to render him? What Muslims and what other terrorists participated [at the Mosque]? Who are your accomplices in evil?
So, what do we know so far? That innocent people were executed for crimes they could not have committed; that some of these gave confessions (voluntarily or as a result of torture); that the belief and fear of witches was widespread. We may rightly ask, what was the motivation of the judges? Were there no sane people at all? Etienne Delacambre argues (reasonably so, I think) that the majority of the judges were probably honest men who truly believed they were doing a service to their society, and that God would intervene for those innocent parties. How many times have you heard, "Well, I'm against torture, but Muslim terrorism is a big problem, and we have to deal with them effectively" or some similar rationalization? For me the answer is "too many."
However, there were individuals who refused to buy into the blatant propaganda. In certain regions (as a result of the Caroline code of 1532), trials had to be held in open courts, and little heed was paid to obviously false accusations (like the accusations and confessions of children). Johann Weyer wrote "On Magic" in 1563, arguing that witches were merely harmless old woman, probably suffering from mental disorders. In return for his sane and objective account he himself was accused of witchcraft (can I say terrorist sympathizer?) by his intellectual peers. Interestingly, it was the elite, intellectual class that continued to decry the menace of witches even after public stopped believing in the threat. It was the intellectual leaders who defended belief in witches in New England. Cotton Mather was one of these officials. He was also a blood-thirsty psychopath. While portraying himself as a concerned minister during the executions at Salem-worried about innocents being executed-when George Burroughs recited the Lord's Prayer, shaking the public's confidence in his guilt, Mather appeared, urging he be executed. While the courts admitted evidence for which there could be no corroboration (like witnesses seeing incriminating spectres that no one else could see), the public were unmoved by the shoddy investigations. Moreover, Mather ensured that the court would come to the correct judgment by appointing three of the five judges, who just happened to be members of his own congregation. It seems more likely that belief in witches was a manufactured phenomenon. The people could see the absurdity of a lot of the evidence and accusations, but they were convinced of the reality of the threat from the top down.
As to how the craze declined, Russell tells us that by the seventeenth century the only thing prolonging the lie was "popular opinion, conservative intellectuals, and obstinate judges," even after government officials ordered a stop to it all. I can just picture a raving Bill O'Reilly ranting in the streets about Osama while a crowd of objective observers watch in stunned disbelief. In fact, the notoriety of trials like Salem turned public opinion against belief in witches. For another clue into the true nature of the craze, it was only after the governing elites themselves had rejected the belief in witchcraft that the popular belief disappeared. Strange, no? It almost seems as though the ruling elite artificially engineered a false "concerted, fifth column attack against Christian society of an organized satanic cult, dedicated to destroying European values," as professor Litke put it. Now, why would they want to do such a thing?
Just as now there is a minority of sceptics speaking against the myth of a "concerted, fifth column attack against Christian society of an organized Muslim cult, dedicated to destroying American values," there was then, but their influence was "limited by the fear of prosecution and by the powerful intellectual pressures exerted by the prevailing belief-system. [...] To reject witchcraft was to court persecution or mockery. [...] One could argue that this or that heretic was not really a witch, or that flights through the air did not really occur, or that the measure taken against this or that accused witch were too harsh, but one could not challenge the heart of the belief. In this intellectual framework belief in diabolical witchcraft was not a superstition, and opponents of this belief operating within the framework could not oppose it as such. It was part of a coherent, dominant world view" (Russell). Similarly today it is possible to argue that a certain individual is not really a terrorist, that certain events did not occur (or occur as presented), or that it is wrong to torture alleged members of Al Qaeda, but to question the heart of the belief-that crazed Muslims hate our freedom and want to destroy us-is to court persecution or mockery.
You will be hard-pressed to find a modern scholar willing to admit the existence of witches then or now (not counting modern Wiccans, who bear no resemblance to the typical image of a witch). Most will admit that witchcraft was a "combination of folklore, superstition and pagan beliefs which were artificially designated heresy and used by the church as an excuse for persecution." Litke even calls it "state and church-sponsored terrorism aimed at social control."
If the world survives the modern War on Terror, you can take it to the bank that historians will look back on our times a similar perspective. Just as with witchcraft, it is an engineered ideology that determines the form that evil takes. In the past it has been Jews, Christians, heretics, witches, Nazis, communists, blacks, gays. Now it is Muslim terrorists and the 'liberals' that support them. This ideology has been manufactured by an elite ruling class, and it is insidiously clever and successful. They have managed to exploit the suffering Palestinians by using their plight as the foundation for the myth of the crazed Muslim fanatic.
While there may not have been any real witches, there are Muslims who have resorted to violence, just as any number of oppressed groups have and are doing at present. The image of the modern Muslim terrorist is not based on Christian superstition, but on an image of desperation. We have been conditioned to be repulsed and afraid of human suffering.
Who stands to gain from this perversion? Who is this ruling elite? What is it about them that, no matter where or when you live, they seek to control and destroy those who are unlike them? How is it that good people are taken in by their lies? How is it that they manage to tell these lies while the rest of us marvel at their audacity or refuse to believe anyone could tell such a lie? What kind of person derives pleasure from torturing innocent people?
The answer should be fairly obvious: those who themselves cannot truly suffer. Those without conscience.
What is the nature of the hunt? Pure Pathocracy.
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Editorial: My Meeting With Rumsfeld
Ray McGovern
May 08, 2006
"Hold 'em, Yale" is one of the best short stories of "Guys and Dolls" creator Damon Runyon, who depicted the New York City underworld in the 1920s. The story deals with an undercover operation to scalp ducats before the annual Yale-Harvard football game. It begins:
What I am doing in New Haven on the day of a very large football game between the Harvards and the Yales is something calling for no little explanation, for I am not such a guy as you are likely to find in New Haven at any time-and especially not on the day of a large football game.
A variant came to mind Thursday as I walked through a posh Atlanta neighborhood to the Southern Center for International Policy to hear a speech by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
What I am doing in Atlanta on the day of a very large lecture by Donald Rumsfeld to an establishment audience is something calling for no little explanation, for I am not such a guy as you are likely to find in such a venue at any time-and especially not when the ducat requires $40 up front.
But serendipity prevailed. The ACLU of Georgia had invited me to their annual dinner on Thursday, May 4, to receive the National Civil Liberties Award. Friends in Atlanta arranged for me to bookend my remarks at the ACLU dinner with a Wednesday presentation to Pax Christi, the Catholic peace movement, and a talk on Friday evening at Quaker House in Decatur. I planned to put the rationale for looming war with Iran in context by drawing an unhappy but direct parallel with the bogus reasons adduced to "justify" the U.S. attack on Iraq more than three years ago.
When those friends learned last Monday that Rumsfeld would be in Atlanta Thursday to give an afternoon speech at the Center, it seemed a natural to go. The event was said to be open to the public, but it took tradecraft skills assimilated over a 27-year career with the CIA to acquire a ticket. (The event was strangely absent from the Center's website, reportedly at the insistence of the Defense Department.)
The fact that my presence there was pure coincidence turned out to be a huge disappointment for those who began interviews later that day by insisting I tell them why I had stalked Rumsfeld all the way from Washington to Atlanta. Especially people like Paula Zahn, who asked me on Thursday evening "what kind of axe" I had to grind with him.
To prepare for my presentations, I took along a briefcase full of notes and clippings, one of which was a New York Times article datelined Atlanta, Sept. 27, 2002, quoting Rumsfeld's assertion that there was "bulletproof" evidence of ties between al-Qaida and the government of Saddam Hussein.
This was the kind of unfounded allegation that, at the time, deceived 69 percent of Americans into believing that the Iraqi leader played a role in the tragedy of 9/11. Rumsfeld's "bulletproof" rhetoric also came in the wake of an intensive but quixotic search by my former colleagues at the CIA for any reliable evidence of such ties.
A fresh reminder of the Bush administration's Iraq deceptions surfaced Thursday morning, when the Spanish newspaper El Pais published an interview with Paul Pillar, the senior U.S. intelligence specialist on the Middle East and terrorism until he retired late last year. Pillar branded administration attempts to prove a link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein "an organized campaign of manipulation... I suppose by some definitions that could be called a lie."
I arrived at the Rumsfeld lecture early, took a seat near a microphone set aside for Q-and-A, and thought I might ask Rumsfeld to explain his use of the "bulletproof" adjective, which came at a time when none other than Gen. Brent Scowcroft was describing such evidence as "scant," and the CIA was saying it was non-existent. (The 9/11 commission later ruled definitively in CIA's favor.)
Rumsfeld brought up bête noire terrorist al-Zarqawi as proof of collaboration between al-Qaida and Iraq, but that was a canard easily knocked down. It appears that Rumsfeld thinks no one really pays attention. Sadly, as regards the mainstream press, he has been largely right-at least until now.
When Rumsfeld broadened our dialogue to include the never-to-be-found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, saying, "Apparently, there were no weapons of mass destruction," I could not resist reminding him that he had claimed he actually knew where they were. Anyone who followed this issue closely would remember his remark to George Stephanopoulos on March 30, 2003:
We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.
As soon as the event was over, CNN asked me for my sources, which I was happy to share. The CNN folks seemed a bit surprised that they all checked out. To their credit, they overcame the more customary "McGovern said this, but Rumsfeld said that"-and the dismissive "well, we'll have to leave it there"-kind of treatment. In Rumsfeldian parlance, what I had said turned out to be "known knowns," even though he provided an altered version on Thursday of his "we know where they are." Better still, in its coverage, CNN quoted what Rumsfeld had said in 2003.
That evening a friend emailed me about a call she got from a close associate in "upper management at CNN" to ask about me. She quoted the CNN manager: "We checked and double-checked everything this guy had to say and he was 100 percent accurate." He then asked if those protesting the war "were getting organized or something." She responded, "Indeed we are and have been for some time, and it's about time the mainstream media caught up."
With the exception of CNN-and MSNBC which also did its homework and displayed the tangled web woven by the normally articulate defense secretary-the other networks generally limited their coverage to the "he-said-but-he-said" coverage more typical of what passes for journalism these days. Even CNN found it de rigueur to put neocon ideologue Frank Gaffney on with me for Wolf Blitzer. Gaffney is well to the right of Rumsfeld, so I should not have been surprised to hear Gaffney take the line that the U.S. may still find evidence of ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Hope springs eternal.
And there were more subliminal messages. In some press reports I was described as a "Rumsfeld critic" and "heckler" who was, heavens, "rude to Rumsfeld." Other accounts referred to my "alleged" service with the CIA, which prompted my wife to question-I think in jest-what I was really doing for those 27 years. I believe I was able to convince her without her performing additional fact checking.
All in all, my encounter with Rumsfeld was for me a highly instructive experience. The Center's president, Peter White, singled out Rumsfeld's "honesty" in introducing him, and 99 percent of those attending seemed primed to agree. Indeed, their reaction brought to mind film footage of rallies in Germany during the thirties. When Rumsfeld replied to my first question about his false statements on Iraq 's WMD, the applause was automatic. "I did not lie then...," he insisted.
This was immediately greeted with what Pravda used to describe as "stormy applause," followed immediately by rather unseemly shouts by this otherwise well-disciplined and well-heeled group to have me summarily thrown out. At the end, as we all filed out slowly, I could make eye contact with only one person-who proceeded to berate me for being insubordinate.
Scary. No open minds there. A graphic reminder for those wishing to spread some truth around that we have our work cut out for us. We have to find imaginative ways to use truth as a lever to pry open closed minds.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour. A 27-year veteran of CIA's analyst ranks, he now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
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Editorial: Announcing Ziopedia.org
Andrew Winkler
Editor/Publisher
The Rebel Media Group
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Daily Planet
Italian lawmakers reach stalemate on first day of presidential vote
AFP
Mon May 8, 2006
ROME - The first round of voting for Italy's next president ended in stalemate with no candidate obtaining a majority of two-thirds of parliamentary votes needed.
Italian lawmakers were unable to break a deadlock which threatens to further stall incoming prime minister Romano Prodi's accession to power, a month after winning a general election.
The presidential candidate presented by the right-wing coalition, Gianni Letta, outgoing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's close aide and undersecretary, received 368 votes, according to a first count.
There were 438 blank votes after Prodi said that the centre-left would leave their ballots blank, in a signal that he could not muster the votes to have his candidate elected in the first round.
Prodi, a former European Commission president, said the move was intended to show the opposition that his coalition was still open to negotiations.
Berlusconi had asked his allies to block Prodi's candidate Giorgio Napolitano, an 80-year-old senator for life and former parliament speaker.
Berlusconi's allies said Napolitano was too left-wing for the job.
"Giorgio Napolitano is an excellent candidate, and we will vote for him when the conditions will be present to elect him president. We hope that the centre-right will join their votes to ours to elect him," said Piero Fassino, secretary of the Democrats of the Left (DS) party, after the vote.
"We will see what happens tomorrow (Tuesday) and we'll decide afterwards," Fassino said.
Voting in a second round was due to start at 11:30 am (1030 GMT) on Tuesday.
More than 1,000 deputies, senators and representatives of Italy's 20 regional assemblies voted in the first round.
A two-thirds majority of 674 would have been necessary to elect a president.
More than 150 voters ignored voting orders and gave their support to people who were not on voting lists. Berlusconi received two votes and his friend, lawmaker and lawyer Cesare Previti, in prison for corrupting magistrates, received three votes.
Prodi, who under Italy's constitution cannot form a government until a new president is elected to succeed the retiring Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, may be forced to wait until a fourth round on Wednesday to ensure that his candidate, or a compromise nominee, is elected when voting is decided by a simple majority.
Napolitano emerged as Prodi's compromise candidate late Sunday after a frenzied round of party meetings designed to break a days-long deadlock.
Prodi had to drop his preferred choice, 57-year-old Massimo D'Alema, from DS, after objections from the centre-right over his communist past.
D'Alema, who is instead likely to be given a cabinet post, gave Napolitano his backing.
"Giorgio Napolitano went in a cardinal and I believe he will emerge as pope," he told Italy's Canale 5 television.
Napolitano also comes from the DS, the largest party in Prodi's coalition, a motley collection of parties ranging from Catholics to communists, which has been pressurising Prodi for a major post.
The choice of president must be a widely respected figure seen to be above party politics, such as the 85-year-old Ciampi, seen by many Italians as a grandfather of the nation. The need for Prodi to win consensus is vital, particularly as his coalition's narrow election victory split the country in two.
Berlusconi has accused the left of seeking to "occupy" the main institutional posts, having already used their tiny majority to elect left-wing speakers to both houses of parliament.
Instead, the centre-right has proposed that Prodi's coalition provide a list of four candidates, former prime ministers Giuliano Amato and Lamberto Dini, the newly elected Senate speaker Franco Marini and former EU Commissioner Mario Monti.
All have been spoken of as likely consensus candidates who may come to the fore as the voting process goes on.
Comment: "More than 150 voters ignored voting orders and gave their support to people who were not on voting lists. Berlusconi received two votes and his friend, lawmaker and lawyer Cesare Previti, in prison for corrupting magistrates, received three votes."
Voting officials later revealed that in an unheard of act of selflessness, Berlusconi had actually cast five votes: two for himself, and three for his friend in prison. They noted, however, that Berlusconi had also signed his ballots and wrote a little note at the bottom that read, "Dear little person, Save this signature. It'll be worth billions. Now, get back to work! What do you think I'm paying you for, you [expletive deleted]?!"
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Defiant Blair refuses to set timetable to quit
AFP
Mon May 8, 2006
LONDON - A defiant British Prime Minister Tony Blair has rejected calls by rebels within his party to name the day he will stand down, saying it would "paralyse" government.
After one of the most bruising weeks of his nine years in power, Blair vowed to forge ahead with market-inspired education and other reforms and to fight "all the way" traditional Labour Party leftists trying to block them.
Speaking at his monthly press conference in London, he also confirmed that he saw ambitious Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, the finance minister who has been waiting impatiently in the wings, as his obvious successor.
"To state a timetable now would simply paralyse the proper working of government, put at risk the necessary changes we're making for Britain and therefore damage the country," said the 53-year-old leader.
Blair announced after Labour's third election victory in May last year that he would serve a full third term in office but not run for a fourth when the next general election takes place, before May 2010.
But poor local election results last week, after a series of politically damaging ministerial mishaps and failings, revived pressure within the party for a timetable for his departure and a transition of power to Brown.
The prime minister retorted that setting out an exit date now would be exploited by leftists seeking to turn the tide against reforms undertaken by a party he had steered toward the centre with massive electoral success.
"That way lies not a fourth-term victory but a defeat and a return to opposition, and I will fight that all the way," he said.
He confirmed Brown was his top choice to succeed him and said he would tell Labour parliamentary colleagues later Monday that he would honour pledges to ensure a "stable and orderly transition to a new leader".
He also said he would stay on to fulfill his election mandate for reform of healthcare, pensions, schools and justice.
Critics claim Labour is distracted by the looming change in leadership, with members either still supporting Blair or lining up behind Brown.
Labour members say Blair will face colleagues at Monday's meeting who are angry at his "ruthless" cabinet reshuffle in the wake of Thursday's municipal council results, Labour's worst since it took power in 1997.
The reshuffle saw the prime minister sack his home secretary, demote his foreign secretary, take powers off his deputy prime minister and juggle other key top posts.
Blair admitted the furore surrounding axed home secretary Charles Clarke -- whose department failed to deport hundreds of foreign prisoners once they were released -- had caused "significant damage" to the party in the polls.
Analysts say Blair swung the cabinet axe to demonstrate his authority, put the scandals of recent weeks behind him and give new purpose to his party, but the moves failed to quell calls for a clear handover of power.
Some 50 rebels have now signed up to a draft letter demanding a timetable for a "dignified, orderly and efficient" leadership transition to be set out by July.
A BBC radio survey of 104 Labour backbenchers found 52 who believed Blair should stand down within a year.
Calls on Blair to resign also came Monday from David Cameron, leader of the main opposition Conservatives who scored well ahead of Labour in Thursday's English council elections.
"I think the sooner he goes the better, because I don't see how his authority can recover," Cameron said.
As to his eventual successor, Blair said there was no doubt Brown as prime minister would continue the reform programme and Britain's close alliance with the United States.
"I believe that those people who maybe feel or hope that Gordon would take the Labour Party in a different direction from New Labour are -- on the basis of the discussions that I have had with Gordon -- completely mistaken," Blair said.
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Reshuffle rumours swirl despite denials
PARIS, May 8, 2006 (AFP)
Rumours swirled over the fate of France's damaged prime minister Dominique de Villepin Monday, despite weekend denials from President Jacques Chirac that any reshuffle is planned in reaction to the dirty tricks scandal known as the Clearstream affair.
With a demoralised government plunging in the polls following claims of an internecine smear campaign, the future of the 52 year-old prime minister remained deeply uncertain after he was accused last week of lying to cover up his own alleged role.
Paris newspapers all carried speculation that Chirac could nominate Villepin's arch-rival - Interior Minister and ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) chief Nicolas Sarkozy - to replace him if the political damage from the Clearstream scandal gets any worse.
Sarkozy, 51, who is the leading right-wing candidate for next year's presidential elections, was said by colleagues to be reluctant to take on what is widely seen as the poisoned chalice of French politics, but might feel duty-bound to accept the prime minister's job if he was offered it.
Patrick Devedjian, a UMP deputy who is close to the interior minister, said Monday that Sarkozy would only agree to take on the post if he was allowed a free hand to carry out his own radical platform of reforms.
"Nicolas Sarkozy will have to implement his own project, in a way bringing forward the 'rupture' which he envisages for 2007 if he is elected president of the Republic," Devedjian told Le Monde newspaper.
A complex and sordid story of bogus corruption claims directed at Sarkozy as well as other French personalities, the Clearstream affair has cast the government into disarray at the start of Chirac's last year in office - offering an unhoped-for boon for the opposition Socialist Party (PS).
Last week the prime minister was forced onto the defensive over the leaked testimony of a senior intelligence official, who said that in January 2004 Villepin - then foreign minister - ordered him to conduct a secret enquiry into a list of alleged account-holders at the Clearstream bank in Luxembourg.
Sarkozy - whose name was on the list - believes he was the victim of a campaign to blacken his name ahead of the 2007 presidential race. His entourage suspects Villepin - if not of starting the false allegations - at least of exploiting them for his own ends.
Last week the government's internal divisions widened further when Defence Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie said she too was targeted in the Clearstream affair, because her partner UMP deputy Patrick Ollier was also on the fake list of account-holders.
Villepin has said repeatedly in interviews and before parliament that he did not order any enquiry into named account-holders, but his denials have failed to still the criticism - with even the generally pro-government newspaper Le Figaro last week accusing him of lying.
With Villepin's popularity rating falling to just 20 percent - the second lowest for a prime minister in the Fifth Republic - Chirac was reported by Le Monde at the weekend to have called in Sarkozy to discuss his possible nomination to the prime ministership.
But the Elysée palace then stepped in to scotch rumours of an imminent cabinet shake-up, saying the president has "complete and total confidence" in Villepin.
Le Monde newspaper reported Monday that Chirac would keep Villepin in office as long as the allegations do not come closer to the president himself - but that he is preparing his options in case the scandal escalates.
According to General Philippe Rondot - the intelligence official at the heart of the affair - Villepin told him in 2004 that his instructions to set up a secret enquiry came from Chirac himself. This was denied last week by the prime minister.
Much depended on any new developments in the investigation by two judges trying to find the source of the original fake claims. They are due to speak to Sarkozy later in the week.
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Bolivia nationalization further sidelines US
By Saul Hudson
Reuters
Mon May 8, 2006
WASHINGTON - By nationalizing Bolivia's energy industry, President Evo Morales lived up to a pledge to be Washington's nightmare and highlighted waning U.S. influence in Latin America.
Last week's action from the leftist, whose allies are U.S. adversaries Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuban leader
Fidel Castro, was another step in the region's retreat from U.S.-prescribed free-market economics.
And the United States can do little to stem a tide of Latin American voters turning to leftists like Morales who rail at free trade and foreign investment for failing to improve the lives of the region's impoverished majority.
"It is a genie that is not going to be put back in the bottle," said Peter Hakim, head of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank.
It was Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela that held an emergency summit with Morales to manage the aftershocks from his decision to send troops to gas fields, alarming investors, rattling markets and angering foreign governments.
The U.S. public response to the nationalization was merely for spokesmen to cautiously express concern over the potential economic impact.
That belied the importance for Washington of Morales' decree to take over the oil and gas industries, giving government energy company YPFB control over production and the state a 51-percent stake in several foreign companies.
"The socialism championed by him and Chavez is an increasing threat to the United States and its economic model that has dominated for decades. That's what's at stake here," said Larry Birns of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs think tank.
"But with the U.S. under-reaction, you'd think the United States is condemned to be an observer," he said.
"GO ITS OWN WAY"
Unable to forge region-wide support for its policies, the superpower and region's traditional patron will have to depend more and more on bilateral cooperation, such as the free-trade deals it has been hammering out in recent years, analysts say.
"U.S. influence in the region now has to be on a country-by-country, issue-by-issue basis," Hakim said.
That is a stark contrast from the United States that launched the Summit of the Americas in 1994 to spread its free-trade agenda, hoping for an accord for the whole hemisphere.
Latin America will keep trading with its closest economic partner but it will seek increasing independence from the United States by deepening its relations with Europe, China and countries across the developing world, according to Birns.
"Latin America will go its own way," he said.
After the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush turned his focus to fighting terrorism in the Islamic world -- and away from Latin America, which he had vowed to make a priority of his presidency.
That neglect meant last year -- for the first time -- the U.S.-backed candidate failed to win selection as head of the Organization of American States, the hemisphere's top diplomatic body.
Some Bush supporters want a renewed focus on the region to counter the anti-American sentiment fueled by leftists like Morales, who vowed to be a U.S. nightmare in his election campaign last year.
"Sad to say, it may already be too late for the Bush administration to garner favorable public support from South and Central Americans," Andy Messing of the National Defense Council Foundation wrote in the Washington Times newspaper.
"But laying the groundwork now could be a necessary and worthy effort to be carried over to future administrations," he added.
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Associated Press Falsely Portrays Chavez as Seeking 25-Year Term
Monday, May 08, 2006
Justin Delacour
Latin America News Review
A little scrutiny of a recent Associated Press report about Venezuela provides a lesson in how the English-language press often gets the story wrong. Take the first sentence: "President Hugo Chavez said Saturday that Venezuelan voters should have the chance to decide whether he should govern the country for the next 25 years."
No, such a referendum would not be about "whether he should govern the country for the next 25 years." A referendum would be about whether Chavez would be permitted to run every six years and --in the event that he were to continue winning elections-- serve multiple presidential terms. The AP report's opening sentence makes it sound as if such a referendum would do away with elections in Venezuela, as if its intent would be to grant Chavez a new 25-year term in office! The website of The Calgary Sun even titles the wire report "Chavez seeking 25-year term"!!
This is obviously an extremely poor piece of reporting. Chavez made it clear that, if the opposition committed to participating in the upcoming presidential election, he would not convoke a referendum to end presidential term limits. He explained that the intent of his threat to convoke such a referendum was not to perpetuate himself in power but rather to defend the Bolivarian Revolution.
Fortunately, Agence France Press (AFP) got the story right. The opening sentence of AFP's Spanish-language report reads, "Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez claimed Saturday that, if the opposition decides not to run candidates in the December presidential election, he could decree a referendum to permit his reelection for multiple terms until 2031."
So the choice for the opposition is simple. If they don't want a referendum that would end presidential term limits, they shouldn't pull out of the upcoming presidential election. As far as I'm concerned, the threat of a referendum is a perfectly reasonable (and democratic) way to dissuade the opposition from trying to delegitimize Venezuela's electoral process.
When Venezuela's opposition knows it's going to lose an election, it has a tendency to try to delegitimize the electoral process. Instead of facing up to the fact that it is unpopular, the business-led opposition tries to shift the blame for its electoral misfortunes to the National Electoral Council (CNE). The opposition claims that the CNE could commit "fraud" and that the vote might not be secret. Opposition conspiracy theories of this nature are legion. Never mind that there have been international observers on hand that have testified to the fairness of Venezuela's elections. Never mind that even the opposition's own polls show that Chavez is much more popular than they are.
In other words, many members of the opposition aren't really interested in trying to win elections because they know that they lack popular support. Many in the opposition prefer, instead, to try to create the impression internationally that Venezuela's electoral process is illegitimate.
One has to understand that, given the combination of the opposition's economic interests and political incompetence, it is very desperate. Since it is unable to attract popular support domestically, the opposition resorts to attempts to draw more U.S. hostility toward Chavez in hopes that such hostility might somehow weaken or destroy his presidency. Electoral boycotts are part and parcel of this strategy. The opposition wants to create the (false) impression internationally that Venezuela is another Ukraine and that Chavez wins elections by "fraud," etc. etc. That's what Chavez is up against.
OAS General Secretary Jose Miguel Insulza effectively summed up the problem that Chavez faces when he said the following about the opposition's boycott of legislative elections last December:
"We had a problem with the Venezuelan opposition, which assured us that they would not withdraw from the [electoral] process if certain conditions were met. These were met and, despite this, they withdrew."
Insulza continued, "if the path of abstention is chosen, then one cannot complain that the entire parliament is in the hands of one's political adversary."
Comment: The above gives a good example of how reality and the truth is deliberately twisted by the mainstream press and how the US government wages wars of attrition (when not invading directly) against democratically elected foreign governments.
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Egyptian Police Kill Militant Leader
By ASHRAF SWEILLAM
The Associated Press
Tuesday, May 9, 2006; 10:59 AM
EL-ARISH, Egypt -- Police on Tuesday killed the leader of an al-Qaida-inspired Islamic militant group wanted for the terrorist attacks that killed 21 people in a Sinai beach resort town last month, officials said.
Nasser Khamis el-Mallahi, head of Egypt's Monotheism and Jihad, was shot dead and an accomplice was captured in a battle with police in an olive grove, said Lt. Gen. Essam el-Sheik, commander of the North Sinai security police.
"This is a major blow to the terrorist group," el-Sheik said.
The Interior Ministry congratulated the police in a statement that described el-Mallahi as "the mastermind and leader of the group that carried out the Dahab and el-Gorah explosions," the semi-official Middle East News Agency reported.
Three bombs exploded almost simultaneously in the Red Sea resort of Dahab on April 24, killing 21 people. Two days later, suicide bombers attacked vehicles of the Egyptian police and an international peacekeeping force in el-Gorah, in the north Sinai, killing only themselves.
El-Mallahi, a 30-year-old father of three, led a group that also had been accused of carrying out attacks that killed 34 people in the Sinai resorts of Taba and Ras Shitan in October 2004 and one in Sharm el-Sheik that killed 64 people in July 2005.
The killing of el-Mallahi came a day after Israel warned its citizens to stay away from the Sinai Peninsula, a popular destination, because of an "increased threat of kidnapping of Israeli citizens on the Sinai coast."
El-Sheik said security forces surrounded the grove south of El-Arish, a Mediterranean coastal city near the border with the Gaza Strip, after receiving a tip that el-Mallahi and his accomplice were hiding there. Bedouin scouts also had reported that the two suspects' tracks led into the grove.
The battle lasted a little over 30 minutes. El-Sheik said the accomplice, Mohammed Abdullah Abu Grair, was captured after running out of ammunition. He was not wounded.
Police found automatic rifles and hand grenades that failed to detonate.
Hundreds of security officers celebrated in front of security police headquarters, chanting "Allahu Akbar!" or "God is Great!"
Egyptian authorities, apparently concerned about damaging the vital tourism industry, which earned $6.4 billion last year, have said the Sinai attacks were the work of local groups with no ties to outside terrorist organizations.
But foreign experts say the various terrorist groups operating around the Islamic world under the name Monotheism and Jihad are likely to have links to the international al-Qaida network.
The precise nature of the links is not clear.
The leader of the Iraqi version of Monotheism and Jihad, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, changed the name of his group to al-Qaida in Iraq after swearing allegiance to Osama bin Laden. However, he is not believed to carry out attacks on the specific orders of bin Laden. The same is believed to be the case with other, less well-known groups, such as Monotheism and Jihad in Egypt.
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Cindy Sheehan pressures Canada
MICHAEL DEN TANDT
Globe and Mail
May 5, 2006
OTTAWA -- Canadian soldiers have no business being in Afghanistan and their presence there merely enables the United States to carry on its "illegal and immoral" war in Iraq, prominent U.S. anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan said yesterday.
"I believe my country shouldn't be in Afghanistan anyway," Ms. Sheehan said at a news conference on Parliament Hill. "It's never about spreading freedom or democracy or making the world safe, it's about lining the war profiteers' pockets."
While lambasting President George W. Bush and the U.S. government for the Iraq war, Ms. Sheehan also fired broadsides at the UN-backed international mission in Afghanistan.
"My country supported Osama bin Laden in the fight against Russia," she said. "And now they go in and tear down that country. It's back in the hands of the drug lords, it's producing more opium than ever, and it's not safe. There's not any rebuilding going on, because it's being occupied by occupying forces."
Canada's deployment of 2,300 soldiers to Afghanistan simply "frees up more soldiers to be in Iraq," Ms. Sheehan said.
Ms. Sheehan and Canadian activists from the Council of Canadians and the War Resisters Support Campaign also called on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to "open the border" to U.S. military deserters.
"I believe our war resisters are legitimate refugees," Ms. Sheehan said.
Ms. Sheehan, whose son, Specialist Casey Sheehan, was killed in Iraq in April, 2004, gained prominence last year when she camped for days outside Mr. Bush's Crawford, Tex., ranch, demanding answers for the war.
Yesterday, she added her fame to the so-far unsuccessful efforts of Canadian peace activists to persuade the federal government to grant refugee claims by U.S. military deserters who don't want to serve in Iraq.
Last month, the Federal Court of Canada ruled against two U.S. Army deserters who had appealed for refugee status in Canada on the grounds that they might be jailed if they return to the United States.
The court ruled that prosecution in U.S. courts does not amount to persecution. Immigration and Refugee Board decisions had earlier rejected requests for political asylum from Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey.
Speaking alongside Ms. Sheehan at yesterday's media briefing, War Resisters organizer Michelle Robidoux said about 20 more soldiers have since fled to Canada. "We estimate there may be several hundred more who are living clandestinely in Canada," she said. "This is an echo of what happened during the Vietnam War."
The activists conceded that current war resisters are different from those in the Vietnam era because they volunteered to serve, rather than being drafted.
However, Ms. Sheehan said, the soldiers are within their rights to desert because many are "lied to" by U.S. military recruiters who tell them they won't have to fight in Iraq. "My son was an honourable, honest person lied to by his recruiter," she said.
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The Earth Strikes Back
Fla. Issues State of Emergency Over Fires
AP
Mon May 8, 2006
NEW SMYRNA BEACH, Fla. - Gov. Jeb Bush declared a state of emergency Monday as brush fires burned more than 8,000 acres, destroyed homes and forced authorities to shut down highways.
Officials are tracking about 50 active wildfires throughout the water-parched state, and Bush said lightning was probably not to blame in most cases.
"The likelihood is most of these fires have been created by either negligence or people doing harm," he said.
A fire in New Smyrna Beach has consumed about 1,300 acres and destroyed three homes. But most of the 1,000 people who were ordered to evacuate Sunday returned home Monday afternoon said Timber Weller, a spokesman for the state Division of Forestry.
A 12-mile stretch of Interstate 95 south of Daytona Beach was not expected to reopen until midmorning Tuesday because of fires burning in the median, according to Florida Highway Patrol. A 20-mile section of the interstate in Brevard County will be shut down early Tuesday morning as a precaution.
A brush fire forced the highway patrol to shut down more than four miles of Interstate 75 south of Tampa on Monday.
Smoke has been settling on roadways, contributing to collisions that have killed four people.
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Major hurricane season brewing in the Atlantic
Associated Press
Mon. May. 8 2006
FREDERICTON -- In what could signal a frightening new fact of life in the age of global warming, Canadian and U.S. forecasters are warning that another major hurricane season is brewing in the Atlantic Ocean.
The 2006 hurricane season officially opens on June 1, and already scientists are telling people living in eastern North America that numerous storms are predicted, with as many as five major hurricanes packing winds of 180 km/h or greater.
"It's kind of comparable to what we were looking at last year at this time," says Bob Robichaud, a meteorologist with the Canadian Hurricane Centre in Dartmouth, N.S.
"Last year we were looking at 12 to 15 storms and this year the forecast is for about 17. No one would go out on a limb and say it is going to be just as bad as last year, but the indications are there that it is still going to be another active season, almost twice as active as normal."
Last year's hurricane season was the most destructive on record.
There were 27 named storms, 15 hurricanes and seven intense hurricanes during the 2005 season. The worst damage was along the U.S. Gulf coast.
Scientists with the Colorado State University hurricane forecast team say the same factors that contributed to last year's violent season are still in play this year.
"The Atlantic Ocean remains anomalously warm, and tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures have continued to cool," says Colorado University forecaster Phil Klotzbach, explaining two of the key triggers for hurricanes.
The Eastern seaboard has been locked in an active storm period for the past decade and while these seasons are normally cyclical, no one knows when, or if, the active period will end.
"Is this global warming? From now on will we see only active hurricane seasons? That's the big question," says Canadian weather guru Dave Phillips of Environment Canada.
While there is no scientific proof that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is breeding more hurricanes, Phillips says global warming could be contributing to the unusual power of the big storms, like last year's Katrina.
"We are seeing stronger hurricanes - almost a 100 per cent increase in category fours and fives," he says.
"When they do develop, they're a lot bigger, tougher and have more destructive power. They stay together longer. This is the concern. They seem to have more power. That could have a connection to global warming - the fact the atmosphere has changed and ocean temperatures have warmed."
Forecasters stress that there is no way to know, at this point, how many big storms will make landfall or whether any will be able to pick up enough steam to significantly affect Eastern Canada.
That's what happened in 2003, when hurricane Juan stoked up energy from unusually warm waters off northeastern North America and blasted the Maritimes, causing death and destruction in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and parts of New Brunswick.
Phillips says that despite this year's grim forecast, a lot can happen to shut down offshore hurricanes and prevent them from causing onshore harm.
"The temperature of the water has to be right, the winds have to be just perfect, the timing has to be just so and the depth of the water has to be just so," Phillips says.
"It's like baking a souffle. A lot of things have to come together and if someone slams the door, it won't rise."
Phillips adds that, curiously, what happens in the Pacific with the La Nina phenomenon can have major impact on the Atlantic hurricane season.
La Nina refers to a pattern of usually cold surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The east-to-west winds of La Nina tend to be more favourable for producing hurricanes in the Atlantic.
While La Nina has been the dominating factor in the Pacific for the past two years, it appears to be easing.
NASA oceanographers say they believe La Nina will not affect Atlantic hurricanes this year.
Whatever happens, people who have experienced the wrath of a major hurricane are taking precautions.
A 2005 Environment Canada survey of about 500 Halifax-area residents, obtained by The Canadian Press through Access to Information, found that a majority of respondents - 53 per cent - now feel vulnerable to hurricanes.
It also found that 71 per cent of respondents would do things differently if another hurricane like Juan is forecast for the area.
Nova Scotia resident Lynn Brooks, who lives near Halifax, was one of thousands of Maritimers who experienced property damage and power outages during Juan.
Brooks says she now keeps extra water in her home, because if the power goes out, her well goes off.
"I think I'm like a lot of people in this region," she says.
"We will never taken another hurricane warning for granted."
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102 dead after four months of heavy rains in Colombia
AFP
Mon May 8, 2006
BOGOTA - Heavy rains and flooding since the beginning of the year have killed 102 people and damaged thousand of homes across much of Colombia, according to state rescue agency Socorro Nacional.
On Sunday, four more people died in a landslide in a poor Bogota neighborhood, and much of the capital remains under emergency warning due to elevated river levels.
Socorro Nacional deputy director Carlos Ivan Marquez said that in addition to the dead, the heavy rains since January have completely destroyed 943 homes and damaged more than 7,100 in the country, affecting about 82,400 people.
"The rains have affected thousands of farms and infrastructure and families in remote and high-risk areas, hitting them hard economically," Marquez said.
Max Henriquez, deputy director of the state hydrology and meteorology agency, said the rains will continue to batter much of Colombia, with the agency predicting another five weeks.
"There is an alert for all of the departments in the center of the country for sudden rises in upland rivers and landslides," he said.
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Earth-Hitting Asteroids: Katrina From Space
Leonard David
SPACE.com
Mon May 8, 2006
LOS ANGELES, California - Natural events such as hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes rock this planet from time to time. But when the Earth gets stoned by an asteroid, consider it akin to a Katrina from outer space.
When Hurricane Katrina slammed into the United States in August of last year, it became a deadly, destructive, and costly episode--one that has also become a metaphor for lack of government action, both pre- and post strike.
At the current time there is no agency of the U.S. government--nor of any government in the world--with the explicit responsibility to develop and demonstrate the technology necessary to protect the planet from near-Earth object (NEO) impacts.�
The U.S. Congress needs to be encouraged to take a step in demonstrating the ability to deflect a menacing NEOs believes former NASA astronaut, Russell Schweickart, Chairman of the B612 Foundation. He presented an update today on dealing with troublesome asteroids here at the 25th International Space Development Conference.
Key capabilities
The goal of B612, a confab of scientists, technologists, astronomers, astronauts, and other specialists is to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid in a controlled manner by 2015.
In detailing today's NEO situation, Schweickart said there are several givens: That the Earth is infrequently hit by asteroids which cross our orbit while circling the Sun; the consequence of such impacts ranges from the equivalent of a 15 megaton (TNT) explosion to a civilization ending gigaton event; and for the first time in the history of humankind we have the technology which, if we are properly prepared, we can use to prevent such occurrences from happening in the future.
"Remember, we're dealing here with a less frequent, but far more devastating Katrina ... a Katrina of the Cosmos," Schweickart reported. "NEOs happen so infrequently that even though they are orders of magnitude more devastating, people don't naturally make that match," he told SPACE.com, "but you don't want to be caught with your pants down."
There are key capabilities, Schweickart said, which will enable humanity to avoid devastating cosmic collisions: Early warning; a demonstrated deflection capability; and an established international decision making process.
While some progress is being made, there remains significant work ahead in all these areas, Schweickart emphasized.
Sky-sweeping surveys
Given sky-sweeping surveys and extrapolating into the future, by 2018 on the order of 10,000 NEOs with some risk of impact over the next 100 years are likely to be cataloged, Schweickart forecast - but there is better than an even chance that none of these 10,000 will actually hit the Earth in those 100 years.�
"The important fact however, is that a substantial number of them will appear as though they may be headed for impact," Schweickart advised. Today, of the 104 currently on impact listings, "two have an elevated risk and we are watching them closely," he said.
At present, the two asteroids on that "keep an eye on them roster" are 2004 VD17 and Apophis, formerly listed as 2004 MN4.
"Extrapolating to 2018 we may have as many as 200 in a similarly elevated attention category and of growing concern to the general public," Schweickart reported today. "Therefore, it is certainly possible, if not likely, that in the timeframe of the next 12 years we--the world--may well be in a position where we need to take action to insure that we will be able to carry out a deflection mission if needed," he said.
The U.S. Congress amended the Space Act in 2005 to charge NASA with responsibility to "detect, track, catalogue, and characterize" NEOs greater than some 460 feet (140 meters) in diameter. However, it has, thus far, come up short on actually assigning the responsibility to take action should one of these objects be discovered headed for a collision, Schweickart pointed out.
There is a bit of good news forthcoming, Schweickart explained. The Congress did require NASA to provide by the end of 2006 an analysis of possible alternatives that could be employed to divert an object on a likely collision course with Earth. In response to this Congressional directive, NASA is about to announce a process for carrying out this mandate.
Global threat ... global response
Schweickart told the ISDC audience here, that a third leg of the triad for protecting the Earth from NEO impacts is probably the most challenging, albeit subtle.�
"It is complicated by two related facts," he said, that NEO impacts are a global threat, not a national one, and the only decision making body representing, essentially, the whole planet is the
United Nations--a body not known for timely, crisp decision making, he added.
Still, in this area, steps forward are being made.
The Association of Space Explorers (ASE)--the professional organization of astronauts and cosmonauts--has formed a committee on NEOs which Schweickart chairs. Earlier this year, a technical presentation at a UN meeting in Vienna apprised them that this issue was coming at them.
While the UN has been brought the problem, Schweickart said, the ASE is committed to bringing them a solution. This solution will take the form of a draft United Nations treaty--or protocol--formulated in a series of workshops over the next two years.
"In these NEO Deflection Policy workshops we will gather together a dozen or so international experts in diplomacy, international law, insurance, and risk management, as well as space expertise to identify and wrestle with these difficult international issues," Schweickart noted. "Our goal is to return to the UN in 2009 with a draft NEO Deflection Decision Protocol and present it to them for their consideration and deliberation."
Facing the challenge
In wrapping up his ISDC talk, Schweickart said the NEO challenge, in a sense, "is an entry test for humankind to join the cosmic community." He reasons that, if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe "it is virtually certain that it has already faced this challenge to survival ... and passed it."
"Our choice is to face this infrequent but substantial cosmic test ... or pass into history, not as an incapable species like the dinosaurs, but as a fractious and self serving creature with inadequate vision and commitment to continue its evolutionary development," Schweickart concluded.
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Volcano erupts on Kamchatka peninsula
PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKY, May 9 (RIA Novosti)
The Bezymyanny volcano has erupted on the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia's Far East, a local seismology official said Tuesday.
Alexei Ozerov, a senior researcher at the Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, said the eruption started at 12.25 p.m. Moscow time (08.25 a.m. GMT) on Tuesday. The eruption does not pose any threat to local population, he said.
"A column of gases and ashes over the crater have reached the altitude of several kilometers...and avalanches of melted debris have been moving down the slope at a speed of about 30km/h (19 mph)," the expert said.
Ozerov said that a cloud of ashes, which is expected to reach the height of 10 km (6 miles) and the diameter of up to 1,000 km (622 miles), had been slowly drifting toward the Pacific Ocean.
"There is a threat to flights along the eastern coast and over of the peninsula," Ozerov said.
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Fourth Quake In Four Days Off Southern Italy
May 9 2006
Lipari - There has been yet another tremor from an earthquake in the Aeolian Islands, this time near Filicudi. Seismic activity was recorded around 9.40 am by the National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanic studies in Rome, with an intensity between the fourth and fifth degree on the Mercalli scale and with an epicentre located in the lower Tyrrhenian Sea.
The tremor was felt by the inhabitants of Filicudi and by those of the nearby Alicudi. There weren't any damages reported to people or houses. It is the fourth earthquake in 4 days in the archipelago, where two tremors were felt in Stromboli and one in the channel between Salina and Lipari.
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Minor Earthquake Shakes Southern Calif.
05.08.2006
Forbes.com
A minor earthquake rattled parts of southern California on Monday but there were no reports of injury or damage.
The magnitude-3.6 quake struck shortly after 5 p.m. and was centered in the Pacific Ocean, about 13 miles off the coast of suburban San Diego, according a preliminary report from the U.S. Geological Survey.
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5.4 Quake Hits Colombia
May 8 2006
Prensa Latina
Bogota - An earthquake of 5.4 degrees in the open scale of Richter Monday shook great part of the Colombian territory although no victims or material damages have been reported so far.
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CIA Battlefield
Revolt of the CIA Analysts
By Ahmed Amr
PalestineChronicle.com
"Goss is a political conservative and a reformer. He is pro-Bush Doctrine and pro-shaking-up-the-CIA. We hope the president will select a new CIA director who is willing--eager, even--to challenge CIA careerists and who will continue the reforms of that dysfunctional bureaucracy that started under Goss. We hope the new director will be an independent thinker, someone who is not cowed by criticism from a vocal (and highly partisan) crew of recently retired intelligence officials." -- The Weekly Standard.
"CIA employees were sitting at their computers Friday afternoon when they saw a message advising them to toggle to the agency's in-house television channel. On their screens they saw CIA Director Porter Goss abruptly announcing his resignation. In at least one office at the agency, and I suspect many more, there were quiet cheers." -- David Ignatius, Washington Post, May 7, 2006.
There is a lot of speculation as to why Porter Goss was outed from the CIA. Some suggest it had something to do with losing a turf battle with John Negroponte - his immediate boss. Other reports make a convincing case that his resignation is related to his staff's passion for hookers, poker and bribes - a fallout from the scandals surrounding Congressman Duke Cunningham.
But the above quotes lead me to suspect he was outed as a result of a mutiny by the CIA's rank and file. When the neocon priests at the Weekly Standard groan and the folks at Langley cheer - it's a sure sign that the Feith/Libby crowd has lost a major battle with the intelligence community.
Goss Porter was assigned to the CIA to 'clean house' of dissenters who were unwilling to take the fall for intelligence failures that never happened. It was no secret that the administration didn't take kindly to the agency's 'negative feedback' about the day to day realities of their Iraqi ventures. In short, the professionals in Langley were guilty of demoralizing their neo-con overlords by insisting on doing their job of providing sound analysis to policy makers. It didn't help matters that former CIA analysts were less than enthusiastic about the outing of Valerie Plame.
Under the able leadership of Goss, the neo-cons got their wish and the CIA troublemakers were given their pink slips or quietly opted for early retirement. The rascals had it coming for not being disciplined enough to gracefully take the fall for the bum WMD intelligence that was cooked up by Douglas Feith at his little canard factory - the Office of Special Plans.
We now have a thousand and one reasons to believe that the intelligence was fabricated to provide justification for this disastrous war of choice. We know that Douglas Feith was the man who had primary responsibility for engineering the WMD hoax. The myth about 'intelligence failure' would have been put to rest two years ago if only the mainstream media had dared to ask some very basic questions about the OSP. But we are where we are because they tell us only what they want us to know.
It is only by the grace of neo-con media moguls in high places that we still have to argue about the systematic lies and deception that paved the path to war. Isn't it enough to know that Judith Miller was one of the media operatives who collaborated in disseminating the WMD leaks - with the explicit approval of Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times.
If the general public was less than curious about who exactly was working on the assembly line of Douglas Feith's intelligence manufacturing operation, the folks at Langley knew every little detail about the anatomy of this hoax. Once the war turned into something spectacularly at variance with the cakewalk envisioned by the neo-cons - many CIA agents refused to take the fall for what they regarded as a 'failure of Likudnik fantasies.'
Porter Goss's mission was to make the Langley rebels 'team players.' Unfortunately for Goss and his neo-con brethren - many of the agency's top guns refused to sign up. Some became insubordinate. Others quit. A few went public with their misgivings.
Which brings us back to all the speculation about hookers, gambling and booze. My guess is that a few disgruntled CIA insiders called on their old contacts in the FBI to dig up some dirt on Porter Goss.
For those who think this is far fetched - check out the following extract from an article I published in February of 2004. And ask yourself one question. If your humble servant - who can't place Langley on the map - knew enough to write this two years ago - what did the folks at the CIA know about the so-called 'intelligence hoax.'
Intelligence Failures for Dummies
Why engineer an intelligence failure? When the intelligence community is not giving you the kind of results you desire, a responsible administration needs to find a way to manufacture its own intelligence and make it look like it was cooked at the CIA.
How do you get around the CIA? First, you let Douglas Feith and Wolfie set up their own intelligence unit in the Pentagon and give it a big name like the Office of Special Plans. Make sure the office is staffed with those who share your neo-con agenda.
What next? You need to develop and groom your own independent sources. You get a guy like Chalabi and his imaginary friends to provide you with the exact answers that fit your game plan. Just to make it legitimate, you use a few trusted journalists like Judith 'WMD' Miller of the New York Times to circulate stories confirming your 'findings'. You now have 'double sourcing'
And then what? You challenge the CIA to match your work. Accuse them of timidity. You get Cheney and Libby to breathe down their necks and berate them for missing the Chalabi lead. You point out that Judith Miller is a second source who confirms the Chalabi story. Who can argue with the New York Times?
Isn't this risky business? Not if the war is a cakewalk. Every body loves a winner. Those who made a fuss about the risks will be made to eat crow. We'll just sit back and enjoy reruns of the 'shock and awe' show. Who will hear the detractors over the din of a victory parade?
What if the war ends up being a long hard slog? Well, in that case, we dispatch David Kay to dig up the phantom WMDs. Let him take his own sweet time. The public will be asked to show a little patience.
What happens when Kay doesn't find a trace of WMDs? Well, Dummy, we just stall and send another guy to resume the search. If that doesn't work, we'll just throw a tantrum and blame it on an 'intelligence failure'. Let the CIA take the fall. The President might have to stitch together a bipartisan inquiry staffed by the usual suspects (like Porter Goss.) By the time they set up shop, argue over rules and scope and agree on a list of witnesses, it will be late spring, early summer. The story will die down once it is 'under investigation by the proper authorities'. Look at the 911 probes and the Plame investigation.
What if the public demands an investigation of the OSP, instead of the CIA? By that time, we would have closed our doors, shredded our files and ceased to exist as an intelligence unit.
Isn't it possible that the media boys will smell a rat? If they smell a rat, it will be the stench of their own skin. Can you see the New York Times investigating Judith Miller's role in our little scam? Better still, how likely is it that Bob Woodward of Watergate fame would look into Krauthammer's collaboration with the OSP. They both toil for the Washington Post. The beauty of this whole venture is that we can get our media operatives to turn up the heat on the CIA and put Langley on the defensive. What can the CIA do? Act like a crybaby and say that a few analysts in an obscure Pentagon office managed to bully them.
Can anything go wrong? Not a chance. Intelligence failures happen. We should know. We make them happen. We'll blame the whole thing on Chalabi and his imaginary friends. Chalabi is more than ready to act as the culprit who passed us bum information. He has been accused of worse things. Chalabi is a good sport and not the kind who worries about his reputation.
Notes in the Margins: An internal Pentagon probe and the Senate Intelligence Committee are supposedly investigating Douglas Feith's intelligence manufacturing operation - the OSP. For reasons unknown, no progress has been made in either of these probes. There is also a suspicious lack of interest by Judith Miller's former employers at the New York Times. In the meantime, Douglas J. Feith has just accepted an offer to join the faculty of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. I suggest they assign him to teach "intelligence failures 101."
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Lawmakers object as Bush picks Hayden for CIA
AFP
May 8, 2006
WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush named Michael Hayden to lead the CIA, despite lawmakers' objections to a military general heading the civilian spy agency.
Bush called on the US Senate to "promptly" confirm the air force general.
"Mike knows our intelligence community from the ground up," Bush said at the White House.
"He has demonstrated an ability to adapt our intelligence services to the new challenges of the war on terror," said the US leader, flanked by Hayden and his director of national intelligence, John Negroponte.
"He's the right man to lead the CIA at this critical moment in our nation's history."
Hayden, currently Negroponte's deputy, was nominated after Porter Goss abruptly resigned as the CIA director on Friday, after less than two years in the post.
Several top CIA officials resigned during Goss's tenure. Reports said Goss may have been forced out because of turmoil in the agency in the wake of highly publicized intelligence failures related to the September 11, 2001 attacks and intelligence used to justify the
Iraq war.
Many Washington lawmakers have expressed doubts about Hayden's independence from the White House and about whether a military officer, who now answers to the powerful Defense Department, should take over the civilian agency.
Concerns expressed by top Republican and Democratic lawmakers have laid the groundwork for what could be a new battle for the White House with Congress over the nomination.
Some lawmakers were critical of Hayden's involvement in a controversial domestic spying program.
Hayden oversaw the National Security Agency's secret wiretapping without a warrant put in place after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Former CIA director Stansfield Turner, a retired navy admiral, said that Hayden's role in the domestic eavesdropping program spelled trouble for his nomination.
"I think Mike Hayden is extremely well qualified for the job, but there is this big question mark over the legality of the wiretapping that was done under his supervision.
"I happen to think it was illegal," Turner told CBS television.
Representative Peter Hoekstra (news, bio, voting record), the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the dual roles of spymaster and military officer are incompatible.
"There is no question that general Hayden is an outstanding military officer and a strong leader with a proven history in the intelligence community," Hoekstra said in a statement. He said a civilian head of the CIA is needed in the interest of "balance".
"By placing a military officer atop the CIA ... we risk losing the critical, civilian intelligence analysis that policymakers need when making foreign policy decisions," he said.
Bush said however that he views Hayden's military background as an asset.
"He's held senior positions at the
Pentagon, the US European Command, the National Security Council, and served behind the Iron Curtain in our embassy in Bulgaria during the Cold War," the president said.
"He's overseen the development of both human and technological intelligence. He has demonstrated an ability to adapt our intelligence services to the new challenges in the war on terror."
Director of National Intelligence Negroponte on Monday likewise defended his top deputy to head the CIA, saying he felt certain that Hayden would not cave in to pressure from the Pentagon.
"I think there's a lot of unfounded concerns there," Negroponte said at a White House press conference.
"Mike Hayden is a very, very independent-minded person, blunt spoken," the US intelligence czar said.
Negroponte said the choice of Hayden underscore's the president's commitment to restore morale among the CIA disheartened workers, while improving the "human intelligence" component of the agency's activities.
But Bush's priority, which Negroponte said Hayden is uniquely qualified to oversee, is the international fight against terrorism.
"His most important priority is intelligence on Al-Qaeda and international terrorism," Negroponte told reporters at the White House.
"I think he (the president) wants us to press ahead in the field of tracking down and disabling and harming the international terrorist movement," said Negroponte.
Comment: Well, sticking a military man in charge of the CIA would accomplish two things:
1. It would increase the influence of the military in all US affairs, both locally and worldwide
2. It just might keep those disgruntled generals happy
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The CIA, a Bush Family Fiefdom
By Robert Parry
May 9, 2006
Since the 9/11 terror attacks, the U.S. government has tried both structural and personnel changes to fix the nation's intelligence services - including now the ouster of CIA Director Porter Goss - but the responses have failed because they've missed the core problem.
What's wrong with the U.S. intelligence community is that over the past three decades its ethos of telling truth to power has been corrupted by politics to such a degree that George W. Bush now sees the Central Intelligence Agency as virtually his family's fiefdom, with the Langley, Virginia, headquarters even named for his father, George H.W. Bush, a former CIA director.
So, when analysts at the CIA were viewed as undercutting George W. Bush's case for war with Iraq, the White House launched a counter-attack against these intelligence professionals for perceived disloyalty.
During the buildup to the Iraq War, Vice President Dick Cheney personally went to CIA headquarters to bang heads with intelligence analysts who doubted White House claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. While some analysts resisted, many mid-level bureaucrats acquiesced to Cheney.
Paul Pillar, the CIA's senior intelligence analyst for the Middle East, said the Bush administration didn't just play games with the principle of objective analysis, but "turned the entire model upside down."
After quitting the CIA in 2005, Pillar wrote an article in Foreign Affairs magazine stating that "the administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made."
"The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard not only in using policy to drive intelligence, but also in aggressively using intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war," Pillar wrote. "This meant selectively adducing data - 'cherry-picking' - rather than using the intelligence community's own analytic judgments."
After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq failed to find WMD, some of the suppressed CIA doubts began to surface, embarrassing Bush during Campaign 2004.
At that delicate political moment, Bush installed Goss, a partisan Republican congressman recruited by Cheney, to take over the CIA. The Goss appointment on Sept. 24, 2004, reflected Bush's determination to bring the agency's analytical division into line with his policies both before and after the November 2004 presidential election.
Loyal Henchmen
Like a Medieval ruler punishing a rebellious province, Bush sent in loyal henchmen to root out perceived traitors. Bush's attitude toward CIA analysts who disagreed with his pre-war assertions about Iraq's WMD was much like his anger toward the French for cautioning him about his Iraq invasion plans.
Being right was no protection from Bush's wrath; indeed, it appeared to make him madder. Though Bush has continued to this day to stress how much he values accurate intelligence as vital for the nation's security, his real record has been one of insisting on getting information that fits his preconceptions.
So, rather than reward the CIA analysts who had resisted White House pressure to cook the WMD intelligence on Iraq, Bush set out to remove them. He also took aim at the State Department, another bastion of WMD dissent, where he replaced the diffident Colin Powell with the enthusiastic loyalist Condoleezza Rice.
At the CIA, Bush's intelligence purge gained momentum in the weeks after he secured his second term. Bush saw his victory as almost a mystical validation of his view that the "war on terror" was a conflict between good and evil in which people were either with Bush or with the terrorists. Bush called the election his "accountability moment."
CIA intelligence professionals got the message that they could either get behind Bush's policies or get out. The loyalty demands led to an exodus of senior CIA officials, including deputy CIA chief John E. McLaughlin and deputy director of operations Stephen R. Kappes.
In whipping the remaining intelligence analysts into line, Bush was helped by powerful conservative news personalities - from AM talk radio to Fox News, from right-wing newspaper columnists to Internet bloggers - who conjured up conspiracy theories about a CIA plot to destroy the President.
Conservative columnist David Brooks was among those pushing the argument that the CIA's only rightful role was to serve the President.
"Now that he's been returned to office, President Bush is going to have to differentiate between his opponents and his enemies," wrote Brooks in the New York Times. "His opponents are found in the Democratic Party. His enemies are in certain offices of the Central Intelligence Agency."
To Brooks, the justification for Bush going after the CIA was the release of information that made Bush look bad.
"At the height of the campaign, CIA officials, who are supposed to serve the President and stay out of politics and policy, served up leak after leak to discredit the President's Iraq policy," Brooks wrote.
"In mid-September [2004], somebody leaked a CIA report predicting a gloomy or apocalyptic future for the region. Later that month, a senior CIA official, Paul Pillar, reportedly made comments saying he had long felt the decision to go to war would heighten anti-American animosity in the Arab world." [NYT, Nov. 13, 2004]
On the Mark
Nearly 18 months later, those CIA assessments seem to have been right on the mark, as violence in Iraq continues to spin out of control and the Middle East seethes with hatred toward the United States.
But in November 2004, the victorious President and his conservative allies were set on throttling those intelligence professionals who still believed that their job was to get the information right, not just tell Bush what he wanted to hear.
Indeed, the claim from Bush's supporters that the CIA only existed to "serve the President" was not historically accurate.
While it may be true that the CIA's operations directorate was created as a secret paramilitary arm for the U.S. executive, the CIA's analytical division was established to provide objective information to both the President and other parts of the U.S. government, including Congress.
Even at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA's analytical division took pride in telling presidents what they didn't want to hear - such as debunking Eisenhower's "bomber gap" or Kennedy's "missile gap" or Johnson's faith in the air war against North Vietnam.
Though never perfectly applied, the ethos of objective analysis continued through the mid-1970s. Then, CIA analysis began to come under sustained attack from conservatives and a new group called neoconservatives, who insisted that the Soviet Union was a rapidly expanding military menace with its eye on world conquest.
The CIA analytical division held a more nuanced assessment of the Soviet threat, viewing Moscow as a declining superpower struggling to keep pace with the West while coping with fissures inside its own empire.
This CIA analysis was the background for the "détente strategy" followed by President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who sought to negotiate arms control and other agreements with the Soviet Union.
Reagan's Emergence
But Nixon's ouster over the Watergate scandal in 1974 and Ronald Reagan's entrance on the national political stage in 1976 altered the political dynamic.
Scared by Reagan's successes in the Republican primaries, President Gerald Ford ordered the word "détente" dropped from the White House lexicon and let then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush open up the CIA's analytical division to an unprecedented challenge from right-wing intellectuals, known as "Team B."
The "Team B" assessment, bringing in old-time Cold Warriors and young neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, accused the CIA analytical division of systematically underestimating the growing Soviet threat.
In late 1976, to accommodate this powerful conservative wing of the Republican Party, CIA Director Bush adopted a more alarmist CIA estimate of Soviet power.
When Reagan became President in 1981, with Bush as his Vice President, the assault on the CIA's analytical division resumed in earnest. Analysts who balked at the new administration's ideological vision of the Soviet Union as a 10-foot-tall behemoth were shunted aside or forced out of the CIA.
The CIA's once proud Soviet division took the brunt of the attacks. The surviving analysts began ignoring the mounting evidence of a rapid Soviet decline, so as not to contradict the Reagan-Bush justification for an expanded U.S. military budget and for bloody interventions in Third World conflicts from Nicaragua to Afghanistan.
In reality, Moscow couldn't even keep control along its own borders. But the Reagan-Bush pressure on the U.S. intelligence process proved so effective that CIA analysts filtered out the evidence of a Soviet crackup.
Ironically, when the Soviet Empire collapsed in the late 1980s, the CIA took the blame for "missing" one of the most important political events of the Twentieth Century. Ironically, too, Reagan, who had built up the Soviet straw man, got the most credit when it fell down. [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
Since then, I have talked with CIA veterans who acknowledged that the politicized agency overstated the Soviet threat despite reliable intelligence from their own agents inside the Soviet bloc who were describing the internal problems.
This "intelligence failure" was not just one of misjudgments; it was one of ideological pressure that distorted the Soviet reality to fit with White House policies.
Whipping Boy
In the second Bush administration, which brought back many of the Reagan-Bush neoconservatives, the same pattern recurred. Intelligence was "cherry-picked" to justify policy, rather than letting objective analysis inform the policy.
In effect, Bush made his decisions on "gut" instincts and had evidence compiled to justify his decisions. When Bush's "gut" failed him - such as when he ignored CIA warnings about the 9/11 attacks or when he pushed bogus intelligence on Iraq's WMD - the CIA stood in as the whipping boy, taking the worst of the institutional blame.
By 2005, the CIA was even stripped of its role as the lead agency in the U.S. intelligence community, when Congress created the new position of National Director of Intelligence on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission.
However, the new post of NDI - directly under the President - didn't address the question of politicization. Nothing was done to rebuild the lost ethos of objective analysis or to reject the notion that the CIA "serves the President."
Bush appointed John Negroponte, a career diplomat considered a Cold War hard-liner, to fill the new position as NDI in April 2005.
Negroponte had served as ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s when the CIA was organizing the contra war against Nicaragua and he represented the United States as U.N. ambassador when the false Iraq WMD case was presented in 2002-2003. In 2004-2005, he was U.S. ambassador in Iraq as sectarian "death squads" emerged as a new threat.
Despite his prominent roles in the Bush administration, Negroponte wasn't viewed as part of the neoconservative inner circle that had pushed the Iraq War. Rather, he fell more into the traditional Cold War camp of hard-nosed operatives who would carry out orders, even ones that stretched the limits of morality.
When Negroponte became NDI, Goss had to face the fact of his diminished role in the intelligence community. Instead of being called Director of Central Intelligence, he became just the CIA director.
Perhaps trying to demonstrate his intense loyalty to George W. Bush, Goss created more turmoil in the CIA by ordering polygraphs of CIA officials in an investigation into who leaked the secret of clandestine CIA prisons in Eastern Europe where terror suspects were interrogated and allegedly tortured.
The polygraphs led to the ouster of veteran CIA officer Mary McCarthy, though she denied leaking the information.
Prostitute Probe
Goss ran into more controversy when his hand-picked executive director, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, became embroiled in the investigation of former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-California, who was sentenced in March to more than eight years in prison for accepting $2.4 million in bribes from military contractors.
Foggo was a longtime friend of Brent Wilkes, a contractor mentioned in the Cunningham indictment. Foggo also attended poker games that Wilkes organized at the Watergate and the Westin Grand hotels in Washington.
According to press reports, federal investigators are looking into allegations that the bribery by the military contractors may have included payments for limousines, poker parties and prostitutes. [NYT, May 7, 2006]
Between the disarray from CIA departures and the hint of scandal around Foggo, Goss saw his political stock decline. Negroponte also reportedly felt that Goss was not adapting well to his new subordinate position as just one of many intelligence directors.
Meanwhile, Negroponte faced opposition himself from aggressive neoconservatives who objected to his more tempered assessment of the threat from Iran's nuclear program and his hiring of some intelligence analysts who had objected to Bush's Iraq WMD claims.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. an original signer of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, called for Negroponte's firing because of his Iran assessment and his "abysmal personnel decisions."
In an article for Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, Gaffney attacked Negroponte for giving top analytical jobs to Thomas Fingar, who had served as assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, and Kenneth Brill, who was U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which debunked some of the U.S. and British claims about Iraq seeking enriched uranium from Africa.
The State Department's Office of Intelligence and Research led the dissent against the Iraq WMD case, especially over what turned out to be false claims that Iraq was developing a nuclear bomb. Gaffney specifically faulted Fingar for his testimony against neoconservative favorite John Bolton to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
"Given this background, is it any wonder that Messrs. Negroponte, Fingar and Brill ... gave us the spectacle of absurdly declaring the Iranian regime to be years away from having nuclear weapons?" wrote Gaffney, who was a senior Pentagon official during the Reagan administration.
Gaffney accused Negroponte of giving promotions to "government officials in sensitive positions who actively subvert the President's policies," an apparent reference to Fingar and Brill.
Iran Cold Water
In an interview with NBC News on April 20, Negroponte had cited Iran's limited progress in refining uranium and their use of a cascade of only 164 centrifuges.
"According to the experts that I consult, achieving - getting 164 centrifuges to work is still a long way from having the capacity to manufacture sufficient fissile material for a nuclear weapon," Negroponte said. "Our assessment is that the prospects of an Iranian weapon are still a number of years off, and probably into the next decade."
Expressing a similar view about Iran in a speech at the National Press Club, Negroponte said, "I think it's important that this issue be kept in perspective."
In effect, the DNI was splashing cold water on the more fevered assessment of Iran's nuclear intentions favored by the neoconservatives around Bush.
Still, Negroponte appears to have come out on top in this latest power struggle. On May 5, Bush announced Goss's abrupt resignation, and on May 8, Bush named Negroponte's current deputy, Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, to become CIA chief.
While Negroponte's bureaucratic victory may represent a defeat for the neoconservatives, it's not likely to solve the larger problem of a politicized intelligence community. Though considered more professional than Goss, Negroponte and Hayden still have shown themselves to be loyal to Bush's edicts.
Negroponte sold Bush's Iraq WMD case at the United Nations and sat behind Secretary of State Colin Powell during his infamous presentation to the Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003. While running the National Security Agency, Hayden implemented Bush's warrantless wiretaps of Americans.
Yet, until the larger question of politicization is addressed - until Bush's sense of entitlement over the intelligence community is ended - the problem of the U.S. government's misuse of intelligence is likely to continue.
[For more on the history of CIA politicization, see Consortiumnew.com's "Why U.S. Intelligence Failed, Redux."]
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Sudden Resignation Of CIA
Director Goss: Another Tremor
In Bush Administration
By Patrick Martin
09 May 2006
World Socialist Web
The resignation of CIA Director Porter Goss, announced abruptly by the White House on Friday, is another demonstration of the instability and vicious infighting within the Bush administration. Goss ends a relatively brief 18-month tenure at the agency, a period during which he conducted a political purge in which at least a dozen top CIA officials were driven out.
The Goss resignation is the outcome of a protracted and murky conflict within the military and intelligence agencies. It involves John Negroponte, Bush's choice as the first Director of National Intelligence; the Pentagon intelligence apparatus, headed by Stephen Cambone, the most trusted deputy of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; and multiple factions within the CIA itself.
Negroponte apparently has emerged as the victor in this infighting, with his deputy, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, former head of the National Security Agency, named by White House officials as the likely choice to succeed Goss at CIA. In an indication that the conflict is continuing, however, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra, appeared on "Fox News Sunday" to oppose the as-yet-unannounced selection of Hayden, saying that the career military intelligence official has experience only in electronic information-gathering, not in covert operations.
There are no clear policy differences among Negroponte, Rumsfeld, Cambone and Goss. They all share responsibility for the Bush administration's criminal war of aggression in Iraq, and for the debacle that the US occupation of the oil-rich country has become. To some extent, there is an institutional conflict between the Pentagon, which controls 85 percent of the vast intelligence budget, and Negroponte's new agency, established in 2005 to centralize control over all 16 US intelligence agencies, including the CIA.
The immediate impulse for Goss's ouster, however, is his apparent link to the sex and bribery scandal involving former Republican Congressman Randy Cunningham, who resigned from Congress last fall and has been sentenced to prison for steering military contracts to several favored companies in return for cash and other payoffs.
Three major newspapers-the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and San Diego Union-Tribune-have published articles in the last 10 days reporting that the investigation into Cunningham's corrupt practices, once thought to be limited to several defense contractors, had been expanded to include other congressmen and government officials, including the number-three official at the CIA, executive director Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, who was installed in that position by Goss.
One contractor named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Cunningham case, Brent Wilkes of San Diego, California, is reportedly suspected of arranging for a Washington-area limousine company to provide prostitutes for Cunningham. These services were provided in conjunction with weekly poker parties in the capital, attended by Republican politicians, government officials and businessmen, which Wilkes has hosted for the past 15 years. A CIA spokesman has confirmed that Foggo, a boyhood friend of Wilkes, had been a regular at those parties.
Christopher Baker, president of Shirlington Limousine and Transportation Inc., the company which provided the limos for these parties, was awarded a $21 million contract by the Department of Homeland Security last year to provide transportation services for top DHS officials. This was despite Baker's criminal record for drug possession, attempted petty larceny, and two felony charges for attempted robbery and car theft, two personal bankruptcy filings and a tax lien from the Internal Revenue Service, which seized his house in 1998.
The Post said that the source of the allegations against Wilkes and Baker was Mitchell J. Wade, one of the defense contractors who admitted bribing Cunningham. Wade has pled guilty to charges in that case and is cooperating with prosecutors. "Wade said limos would pick up Cunningham and a prostitute and bring them to suites Wilkes maintained at the Watergate Hotel and the Westin Grand in Washington," the newspaper reported. The Union-Tribune cited a statement from Baker's attorney confirming that Baker had provided limousine services for Wilkes's poker parties from 1990 on, but denying any link to prostitution.
Baker's business arrangements with the DHS were highly unusual. In addition to his own criminal record, which would ordinarily make him an unlikely candidate for a contract to transport top officials in charge of US domestic security, Shirlington Limousine was in poor financial shape. It lost a contract with Howard University for non-performance, and was repeatedly sued for non-payment. At a critical time, in April 2004, the company was awarded a $3.8 million DHS contract for which it was the sole bidder. A year later, Baker succeeded in escaping bankruptcy, paying $125,000 to his creditors. In October 2005, his company won a much larger one-year contract for $21.2 million.
A DHS spokesman sought to explain the relationship with the preposterous claim that while the department conducted criminal background checks for all the limousine drivers, no such check was required for the company's owner. The agency was unaware of Baker's long record of petty crime, the official said.
The connections between Foggo and the Cunningham case may go beyond the seedy questions of gambling and prostitution. Several press reports indicate that the CIA inspector general is examining whether Foggo rigged any contracts from the agency to companies associated with Wilkes. Foggo has told his CIA associates that he will follow Goss into retirement, stepping down as the CIA executive director.
The New York Daily News reported Saturday that Goss himself "may have attended Watergate poker parties where bribes and prostitutes were provided to a corrupt congressman," adding that Foggo could soon be indicted in the case. The newspaper cited statements by former CIA operative Larry Johnson, a frequent critic of the Bush administration, that Goss and Foggo "share a fondness for poker and expensive cigars," and that he understood Goss had occasionally attended the parties thrown by Wilkes. According to the News, "One subject of the FBI investigation is a $3 million CIA contract that went to Wilkes to supply bottled water and other goods to CIA operatives in Iraq and Afghanistan, sources said."
While the tabloid newspaper focused attention on sex and bribery, the more establishment press-particularly the New York Times and Washington Post-were careful to distance the Goss resignation as much as possible from the sordid details of the case. The Times went so far as to publish separate articles on the two subjects Sunday, as though it were possible to consider the political conflicts within the Bush administration outside of the gross corruption that is such an essential part of its character.
Foggo is a career CIA mid-level official who was suddenly vaulted into the top ranks when Goss became director and forced out the previous number-three executive, Michael Kostiw, as part of a purge of allegedly anti-Bush officials in the upper reaches of the agency. Foggo reportedly became a Goss crony while serving as chief of logistics at the CIA station in Frankfurt, Germany, during the period when Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was on inspection trips to CIA offices overseas.
Goss's tenure as CIA director has been one of near-continual crisis, particularly the last eight months, since the existence of clandestine CIA detention centers overseas was made public by the Washington Post. This was followed by a frenzied anti-leaking campaign spearheaded by Goss personally, in an effort to find the source of the Post report. Last month, a veteran CIA official in the inspector general's office, Mary McCarthy, was fired only a week before her scheduled retirement, allegedly for failing a lie detector test about contacts with the press, including the Post. But McCarthy has subsequently denied even knowing of the secret prisons, let alone being the source, and CIA officials admitted that there was no evidence against her on that leak.
The nomination of Hayden could prove to be a political time-bomb for the administration, since confirmation hearings would likely feature questioning about his work at the NSA, where he was responsible for the secret electronic surveillance of American citizens, an operation whose existence was revealed to the New York Times in December. This leak produced another high-pressure internal security investigation, although no one has yet been fired or charged with being the source.
The leaks and counter-leaks demonstrate the increasingly Byzantine atmosphere in official Washington. With all political issues funneled through the increasingly dysfunctional channels of a two-party system in which the nominal opposition, the Democratic Party, offers no alternative to the Republicans, policy disputes within the ruling elite cannot find expression in open debate.
Moreover, so great is the chasm between the official rhetoric of the "war on terror" and reality of predatory seizure of oil resources and strategic positions to benefit American imperialist interests, that no one in the Bush administration, Congress or the corporate-controlled media can discuss foreign policy and security issues publicly in a realistic and serious way.
Hanging over all these debates is the question of the 9/11 attacks and the ample warnings that the military and intelligence agencies received in advance. After countless toothless investigations, not a single top official has been punished for what was either colossal incompetence or deliberate malfeasance. Instead, the conflicts within the intelligence apparatus are taking on the character of a veiled struggle within a palace court.
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Gen. Michael Hayden refused to answer question about spying on political enemies at National Press Club
Amy Goodman
At a public appearance, Bush's pointman in the Office of National Intelligence was asked if the NSA was wiretapping Bush's political enemies. When Hayden dodged the question, the questioner repeated, "No, I asked, are you targeting us and people who politically oppose the Bush government, the Bush administration? Not a fishing net, but are you targeting specifically political opponents of the Bush administration?" Hayden looked at the questioner, and after a silence called on a different questioner.
AMY GOODMAN: We return now to the rare news conference held by General Michael Hayden, the Deputy Director of National Intelligence and former head of the N.S.A., speaking to reporters and others on Monday in Washington, D.C., as part of a public relations offensive by the Bush administration to defend the N.S.A.'s eavesdropping on American citizens without court warrant.
In a separate speech later in the day, President Bush repeated his argument. He had the legal and constitutional authority to authorize the program without congressional approval. Meanwhile, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is scheduled to discuss the legal justification for the program today. And on Wednesday, President Bush will pay a rare visit to N.S.A. headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland. But it was General Hayden who launched the media offensive Monday morning. These are the excerpts of the news conference, beginning with Hayden being questioned by a reporter.
REPORTER: General Hayden, the FISA law says that the N.S.A. can do intercepts, as long as you go to the court within 72 hours to get a warrant. I understood you to say that you are aggressively using FISA, but selectively doing so. Why are you not able to go to FISA, as the law requires, in all cases? And if the law is outdated, why haven't you asked Congress to update it?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: If FISA worked just as well, why wouldn't I use FISA? To save typing? No. There is an operational impact here. And I have two -- two paths in front of me, both of them lawful: one, FISA; one, the President's authorization. And we go down this path because our operational judgment is: It is much more effective. So we do it for that reason. I think I got -- I think I've covered all the ones you raised.
REPORTER: Quick follow-up. Are you saying the sheer volume of warrant-less eavesdropping has made FISA inoperative?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: No. I'm saying that the characteristics we need to do what this program is designed to do, to detect and prevent, okay, make FISA a less useful tool. It's a wonderful tool, it's a wonderful thing for the nation, in terms of fighting the war on terror, but in this particular challenge, this particular aspect, detect and prevent attacks, what we're doing now is operationally more relevant, operationally more effective.
SAM HUSSEINI: Sam Husseini from IPA Media. You just now spoke of, quote, "two paths." But, of course, the FISA statute itself says that it will be the exclusive means by which electronics surveillance may be pursued. Are you not, therefore, violating the law?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: That's probably a question I should deflect to the Department of Justice. But as I said in my comments, I have an order whose lawfulness has been attested to by the Attorney General, an order whose lawfulness has been attested to by N.S.A. lawyers who do this for a living. No, we're not violating the law.
SAM HUSSEINI: You cited before the congressional powers of the President. Are you asserting inherent so-called constitutional powers that a -- to use a term that came up in the Alito hearings -- a unitary executive has to violate the law when he deems fit?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: I'm not asserting anything. I'm asserting that N.S.A. is doing its job.
MINISTER: General, first, thank you for your comments, and I think you somewhat answered this in your response. And this goes to the culture and just to the average American. Let me just say this, that domestic spying -- and the faith communities are outraged. Churches in Iowa, churches in Nebraska, mosques across the board are just outraged by the fact that our country could be spying on us. You made a point that the young lady at State Penn shouldn't have to worry, but we're worried that our country has begun to spy on us. We understand the need for terrorism and the need to deal with that. But what assurances, and how can you answer this question -- what can make Americans feel safe? How can the faith community feel safe that their country is not spying on them for any reason?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Reverend, thanks for the question. I'm part of the faith community, too. And I've laid it out as well as I could in my remarks here, as to how limited and focused this program is, what its purpose is, that it's been productive. We are not out there -- and again, let me use a phrase I used in the comments -- this isn't a drift net out there where we're soaking up everyone's communications. We're going after very specific communications that our professional judgment tells us we have reason to believe are those associated with people who want to kill Americans . That's what we're doing.
And I realize the challenge we have. I mentioned earlier, the existential issue that N.S.A. has, well before this program, that it's got to be powerful if it's going protect us. And it's also got be secretive if it's going to protect us. And that creates a tremendous dilemma. I understand that. I'm disappointed, I guess, that -- that perhaps the default response for some is to assume the worst.
I'm trying to communicate to you that the people who are doing this, okay, go shopping in Glen Bernie, and their kids play soccer in Laurel, and they know the law. They know American privacy better than the average American, and they're dedicated to it. So I -- I guess the message that I'd ask you to take back to your communities is the same one I take back to mine: This is focused. It's targeted. It's very carefully done. You shouldn't worry.
MINISTER: Just know, General, that the faith communities will take that back, but the faith communities are scared. Where does this stop?
JUSTINE REDMAN: Justine Redman with CNN. How was the national security harmed by The New York Times reporting on this program? Don't the bad guys already assume that they're being monitored anyway, and shouldn't Americans bear in mind that they might be at any time?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: You know, we've had this question asked several times. Public discussion of how we determine al-Qaeda intentions -- I just -- I can't see how that can do anything but harm the security of the nation. And I know people say, 'Well, they know they're being monitored.' Well, you know, they don't always act like they know they're being monitored. But if you want to shove it in their face constantly, it's bound to have an impact. And so, to -- I understand, as the reverend's question just raised, there are issues here that the American people are deeply concerned with. But constant revelations and speculation and connecting the dots in ways that I find unimaginable and laying that out there for our enemy to see cannot help but diminish our ability to detect and prevent attacks.
TRAVIS MORALES: My name is Travis Morales, and we've read numerous reports in the Times and other papers about massive spying by the N.S.A. on millions of people, along with reports on rendition, torture, etc., and I attended Congressman Conyers's hearings on Friday, where a gentleman came from South Florida talking about how military intelligence went and infiltrated his Quaker peace group, and that this -- they later saw the documents detailing that.
And my question -- I guess I have two questions for you. One is, as a participant in a group called the World Can't Wait: Drive Out the Bush Regime, which is organizing for people to drown out Bush's lies during the State of the Union, and there's a gathering on February 4 demanding that Bush step down, my question is this: Are you or the N.S.A. -- when I say you, I mean the N.S.A. in its entirety -- is it intercepting our email communications, listening to our telephone conversations, etc.? Because, as Bush has said, you're either against us or you're with us, and they have asserted that whatever the President wants to do in time of war, whether it's holding people without charges or writing memos justifying torture, they can do that.
My second question is this, related to that. I publicly challenge you and the N.S.A. to an open debate, a public open debate, that people can gather and listen to your responses, a debate on this warrant-less wiretapping and spying on millions of people that have gone on across this country, because as the reverend said, millions and millions of people are outraged. That is why people are talking impeachment. That is why people are demanding that Bush step down, because of this massive spying, the torture, the rendition, and everything else. So I challenge you to a public and open debate on these questions.
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: What was the question?
TRAVIS MORALES: Will you openly and publicly debate us, myself, in a forum that's open to the public, not restricted, on the N.S.A. spying scandal and defend what has been said and respond to the numerous reports about the N.S.A. spying on millions of people? That is one question. The second question is: Are you spying on or intercepting our communications, e-mails and telephone conversations, of those of us who are organizing the World Can't Wait to Drive Out the Bush Regime?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: You know, I tried to make this as clear as I could in my prepared remarks. I said this isn't a drift net. I said we're not out there sucking up comms and then using some of these magically alleged key word searches. 'Did he say jihad? Let's get --' That is not -- do you know how much time Americans spend on the phone in international calls alone? Okay? In 2003, our citizenry was on the phone in international calls alone for 200 billion minutes. I mean, beyond the ethical considerations involved here, there are some practical considerations about being a drift net. This is targeted. This is focused. This is about al-Qaeda.
The other request about a public debate, as I mentioned at the beginning of my prepared remarks, this is a somewhat uncomfortable position for someone in my profession to be in, laying out details of the program. One way of describing what you have invited me to would be why don't you come out and tell the world how you're catching al-Qaeda? And I can't do that. That would be professionally irresponsible.
JAMES ROSEN: Excuse me, James Rosen, McClatchy Newspapers. General, you said that if this program had been in place before 9/11, you're pretty confident that you would have detected at least some of the hijackers' presence in the United States and maybe stopped the attack. If that's the case, why is this limited to communications where one person is ov