Iraq War Videos Not On American Media *Video Inside Iraq What You Won't See On American Media (An exclusive, in-depth interview with journalist Dahr Jamail on what is really going on in Iraq) *Iraq War Videos *Iraq War Videos Courtesy of BlackCat Dahr Jamail recognized that Americans were being misled about the US occupation of Iraq, so he went to Iraq to find the truth. After being unembedded in Iraq totaling over 8 months, he returned to the States to tell what he discovered. In this video Dahr Jamail speaks of the horrors of occupation, the use of illegal weapons by American forces, the rip-off of American taxpayers by Bechtel and other US corporations, the shabby and biased media coverage of the situation by US media, and of the resilient determination of the Iraqi people to be free from foreign occupation. *Inside Iraq What You won't read on American Media Stumble It!

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching. It unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. The money powers preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me & the financial institutions at the rear, the latter is my greatest foe. Corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed." - Abraham Lincoln, letter to William Elkins, Nov 21, 1864 "Don't Worry. The Idea is To Get Rid of Welfare as They Know it (Poor & Needy,) Not as We (Corporations & Rich) Know It." This country has a $7 trillion national debt, a growing deficit and is borrowing money from the Social Security Trust Fund in order to fund government services. We can no longer afford to provide over $125 billion every year in corporate welfare - tax breaks, subsidies and other wasteful spending - that goes to some of the largest, most profitable corporations in America. *Congressman Sanders on US Corporate Welfare Giveaways ... if we eliminated corporate welfare, that alone would allow for the income tax to be reduced by nearly 1/2 for those making between $27,682 and $55,225, and abolished entirely for those making below $27,682. This would benefit wage-earners enormously by offsetting the regressive nature of the payroll tax, and would benefit small businesses by eliminating the anticompetitive nature of corporate welfare spending. The death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown in a Balkans plane crash exposed the real reason President Clinton sent American troops to Bosnia: to make the world safe for corporate welfare. Standard American Fighter Sections built by "NBC, Exxon, ConAgra, Monsanto, WalMart, Pfizer" (May 2004 - Over the past hundred years our government has sent troops into battle on foreign soil numerous times. A reason frequently given to the public is that it was necessary to bring freedom and relief to an oppressed people, or more recently to protect the homeland. With a few exceptions like World War II and Afghanistan, the actual underlying reasons have usually been corporate economics.) *Subsidizing Corporate Economics Thru War An aspect of the so-called Dayton Peace Accords, which led to the deployment of U.S. troops, was an initial installment of $600 million in U.S. foreign aid, much of it for construction contracts. As was the case in Vietnam, Kuwait, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, and now Bosnia, America's corporate elite are shamelessly bilking the taxpayers and putting American lives at risk, all under the guise of patriotism and "nation building." *Ron Brown's Corporate Welfare Scam *Why We Need to Abolish Corporate Welfare Corporate welfare describes the billions (if not trillions) of dollars in grants, subsidies, padded contracts and other government assistance handed to corporations by the U.S. and other governments. Corporate welfare in the United States likely started in earnest with the distribution to railroad companies of lands, often including those used by indigenous nations. Universities also were granted vast tracks of land, from which timber and other resources were sold below market price to the universities' industry friends. Mining companies in the United States are among the largest beneficiaries, granted the privilege of mining private and even public lands without paying so much as an excise tax in many states. The United States is among a very few nations where mineral resources can be privately held and where mineral development is not taxed. While the United States complains loudly about "trade barriers" when other nations impose a tarrif to protect agricultural interests, America's corporate leaders enjoy durable wealth from one of the largest corporate land-and-resource grabs in world history - the seizure of the American West. Some sites, like the Black Hills of North Dakota, are being contracted as corporate welfare handouts to mineral companies even before the native residents agree to an imposed settlement intended to quiet their complaints. Using the Halliburton Company as a prime example of Corporate Welfare, the Center for Cooperative Research says "Manipulating U.S. foreign policy isn't the only strategy in Halliburton's repertoire of means to securing profits. Another method that has apparently proven extremely successful is doing business with the government and bidding on contracts financed by U.S. dominated bilateral and multilateral aid agencies. Although Dick Cheney had once lashed out at Joe Lieberman saying that his success at Halliburton "had absolutely nothing to do with the government," the real facts have shown otherwise. Corporate welfare may not always involve direct transfers of cash to companies. It may take the form of laws that offer below-the-radar tax write-offs and corporate tax evasion schemes, as several articles here *demonstrate *Corporate Welfare Research Index Get Tough So Corporate Welfare Can Prosper Whilst the Poor & Disenfranchised Disappear Onto the Streets Corporate leaders have abandoned the old fashioned methods of social control which were embodied in the New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. Beginning in the Early 80’s , corporate elites have been relying increasingly on a fundamentally different “get tough” approach or strategy designed specifically to strengthen corporate power over people by making them less secure. This new strategy, economic warfare against the working class, is what motivates corporate leaders’ new unbridled enthusiasm for the so-called “discipline” of the free market, which they frequently use to justify not only market-driven health care but also downsizing and attacks on the social safety net. *Economic Warfare On the Poor For Social Control WELFARE FOR THE RICH – In America the Free Market System is treated like a sacred principle. Don’t be fooled, it’s a fucking hoax. The US economy is rigged. Our Economics textbooks tell us that all our economic problems will be cured by the functioning of the free market which through natural competition will cause the best products and the best prices to prevail for the betterment of all. It’s total bullshit!! Remember all that crap you learned in civics class about “laissez faire” economics. Well forget it. The reality is quite different. Government intervention has always played a central role in the modern capitalist system. (think of it as “socialism for the rich”, & “laissez faire” economics for the rest of us) Government subsidies for private corporations are disguised under the Pentagon System or “DEFENSE’ which takes half of every tax dollar. Public subsidies(taxes paid by us) subsidize R & D (research & development) in the computer, electronics & aeronautical industries, just to name a few. Other examples of industries which rely upon public subsidies are the biotechnology, pharmaceutical industries, & agribusiness. In other words, “a complex system of tax laws, government manipulation of public money, regulations and other magic tricks insure that certain businesses will thrive regardless of whether the free market will support them or not.” *Downsize This Right after President Clinton signed the new welfare reform bill, its full meaning became crystal clear. This new law isn't just about weakening the labor movement in the United States. It isn't only about lowering workers' wages overall. It isn't even just about kicking impoverished women and their children off welfare assistance. It's also about transferring billions of dollars to Big Business as an entire sector which was once in the public economy and publicly managed passes into private hands. Clinton's signature on the legislation to abolish federal welfare assistance in America has created a feeding frenzy among private corporations seeking to profit directly from the destruction of social benefits. For business sharks in America, welfare "reform" is being viewed as a lucrative new field that promises to become a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. It is, no doubt, becoming one of the largest transfers of public sector operations into private hands, giving one new meaning to the term "corporate welfare." "The new welfare law has many corporate welfare provisions. The changes open up new markets for companies to sell their services, while providing a pool of free labor. As the government moves to restrict welfare for poor people, they're expanding it for the corporations," stated Cecilia Perry, public policy analyst. *Whispering In Clinton's Left Ear Welfare Reform is becoming one of the largest transfers of public sector operations into private hands. *Striking It Rich in the Welfare-Biz You may be thinking, Well, at least my taxes are going to help catch terrorists ($200 billion worth), right? Wrong. the $100 billion extra we scrimped from other programs to hand the military? Most goes to contractors who sell the U.S. overpriced and sometimes obsolete weapons systems. So the military budget (before the extras, $393 billion in 2003) that we authorize so that we’ll be protected is really being used to pad contractors’ pockets and secure oil in the Middle East. And it’s not the people driving gas-guzzling hummers who pay for this. Instead of being sanctioned for increasing our dependency on oil, they enjoy a $25,000 tax break. *TAKE THE RICH OFF WELFARE IF YOU THINK that practically everybody favors getting people off the dole, breaking their dependence on the government and making them earn their own keep, think again. Our number one political cliche when it comes to social policies-"get them off welfare"-applies only to the poor, the weak and the vulnerable. Welfare for the rich is thriving in these days of giant deficits, shifts to users' fees and workfare. Corporations pay no taxes, and get yours? You pay their expenses, they keep the profits. Resources .... *The Empire Of The Pigs *High Tech Splat *How to Become a Top Banana *Stop Corporate Welfare! *CORPORATE WELFARE THE FACE, THE CASE, THE REMEDY The battles between Republicans vs. Democrats is a farce to distract the public from the slow usurption of global power, involving all top officials (both parties), top military, mafia, weapons manufacturers, cocaine/opium traffickers, and international bankers. *Gore Vidal Welfare State Audio In the near future, multinational corporations will own everything, from information to cover scanland to social services. The cost of food, fuel, and services will be prohibitive. Cities will become chaotic and dangerous. Climate will be extreme and unpredictable. Environmental protection will become a convenient excuse for corporations to appropriate land and resources. Youth will feel that the greed of older generations robbed them of their future and their present. Stumble It!

Today's American Neo-Con Made Americans just ignore the devil in the details or (Americans just engage in willful ignorance) I AM not a love-it-or-leave-it American. I'm an in-it-for-the-long-haul American, celebrating progress, lamenting regression, and plugging away for the new and improved. But I'm perplexed about one problem plaguing the state of the union that is particularly resilient to rescue. I'm afraid we are afflicted with an outbreak of shallow thinking in the land. The condition is widespread and the cure is elusive. In our own time -- and especially since the ascendancy of George Bush to the presidency -- "neoconservative" has become a term frequently associated with "in your face attacks," and extreme arrogance. But the heat generated by the term also stands as a backhanded tribute, an acknowledgment that the neoconservative impact has been substantial. It is today too soon to offer a comprehensive assessment of that impact. The discussion of neoconservatism offered here has a more modest objective, namely, to suggest that one aspect of the neoconservative legacy has been to foster the new "Wild West Shootouts around the World," and the emergence of the new American militarism, and the lack of any sizeable American opposition or any mass public outcry concerning American foreign policy. "They love talking about expanding democracy throughout the world (at least, the oil-producing world) but care little about favored authoritarians and tyrants. They are the people who led this country into Iraq where more than 1,600 GIs have been killed (official figure,) not to mention the many thousands wounded in body and mind (30,000) and over 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. But guess what? Virtually no neocon offspring are to be found on the front line in Iraq or Afghanistan. They praise war and warlike virtues and denounce the decadence of intellectuals. They want women to return to children, cooking, and the church. They delight in the profusion of flags: flags on cars, flags on houses, flags worn in lapels. They encourage citizens to inform on their neighbors. They plan to establish a new world order to rival Rome." Referenced from .... *Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire Bush Fantasy Matrix The Bush White House has masterfully used the public's general indifference to all things overseas to its advantage in war and peace - but mostly war. It has successfully reinforced the notion that finessing foreign sensibilities is a fickle experiment at best and citizens need not trouble themselves unduly over multilateral tangos. Moreover, to display its faux affinity for the common man, the administration has boiled down the whole foreign relations thing to one easy understanding. You're either fer or agin' us, said the man from Midland, Texas. Simple, straightforward, and as shallow as they come. Yet it was all the gunslingers in Washington had to say to the world before shooting their way into Baghdad to spread democracy, topple an evil empire, and destroy weapons of mass destruction. Well, one out of three ain't bad. And it's good enough for a homeland largely afraid to doubt the wisdom of a done deal or question a kick-ass commander in chief gunning for retribution in the Middle East. Despite protests to the contrary, people preferred to believe that the President must know more than they do about dreadful Iraq and were content to leave it at that. Neo-Con Commandments Three years and more than 1,600 American deaths later (official figure,) with the U.S. nowhere close to escaping the warfare it started there, Americans still nod like lemmings when the President insists "democracy is on the march" amid the rubble of Iraq and resurging Taliban influence in Afghanistan. More Lies & Coverups "Between 40,000 and 50,000 US military personnel are in Iraq despite serious medical conditions that should have ruled them out of combat, according to the National Gulf War Resource Centre. The GI Rights Hotline, which counsels troops, says it fielded 32,000 calls last year from soldiers seeking an exit from the military, or suffering from post-combat stress." .... *American Wounded In the Field "Actually, and I have seen the figures from the Pentagon, over 8,000 are dead ...." *the Real Dead & Wounded "The Americans are losing the war in Iraq and in their frustration have started using chemical weapons and napalm bombs on civilian populations," .... *U.S. using chemical weapons against civilians Frankly, shallow is good enough when too much reflection might bring reality into focus. And if the genuine article is dramatically different from the official version, then what? We live in fast-food times with little patience for complexities or shades of gray. We are not a country predisposed to ponder too many variables in life. The need to know is overrated. Not surprisingly our politicians mirror the society they serve. They craft easy-on-the-ears stump speeches that a first grader could repeat word for word. They perfect catch phrases to sum up everything from war to welfare guaranteed to appease the not-so-inquiring minds of their audiences. And if the malleable masses are spoon-fed disaster packaged as appealing dessert, darned if they don't line up for more. Neo-Con Spooks In the prevailing shallowness of America, the shrewd can inherit the earth. They can lead an anxious but trusting nation into a war of choice by sounding as if they had no other option. They can push through tax breaks that cost trillions and plump up record deficits by sounding as if fiscal restraint would be folly. They can promote private accounts as saving supplements to Social Security by sounding as if personal investment is preferable to government checks, reliability notwithstanding. Shallowness allows schemers to gut environmental programs by sounding as though they advocate them with cleverly named initiatives that only a profit-seeking polluter could love. They can sell their propaganda as mainstream news without disclaimer by sounding sincere in their unorthodox approach to winning friends and influencing voters. They can even obscure the tangled web of deceit that Condi Rice lugs around in first-term baggage by sounding like 2008 could be her year. Next Neo-Con Vice-President And America the beautiful will bite at whatever sounds good or seems right if it's smartly delivered by someone who simply must know more than the average bloke about politics, prosperity, and pre-emptive war. Besides, how wrong can it be when those leading us all off the cliff sound as if pain is precluded altogether? If the consequences of poor policy from fiscal to foreign ever raise the specter of sacrifice, as they surely will and surely are, the shallow won't know what to think. It's that bad and policy makers only pray it gets worse. Neo-Con War On Iraqi Children On U.S. Inauguration Day, most didn't seem to notice. Oh, they played a few clips that night of the American president saying, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." On the front page of The Irish Times was a large four-color picture of a small Iraqi girl. Her little body was a coil of steel. She sat knees up, cowering, screaming madly into the dark night... Reference and Complete Article .... *What the Rest of the World Watched on Inauguration Day Neocon Treason In a chapter that is must reading for every American who thinks President Bush should be reelected, Buchanan asks: "Who are they, the neoconservatives?" When you find out, you will want nothing further to do with the president who sponsored them and gave them unbridled power to launch America into permanent war in the Middle East. The neocons have declared America at war with 1 billion Muslims who have done us no harm. Simultaneously, the neocons destroyed our traditional alliances. Instead of isolating a terrorist enemy, neocons have isolated America. Al-Qaeda is not a state or a country. It is a non-governmental organization that rejects America's decadent culture and opposes the U.S.-Israeli alliance that brutally oppresses Palestinians to the shame of all Muslims. It is impossible to fight al-Qaeda by invading and occupying Muslim countries. Bush's invasion of Iraq has achieved nothing for the U.S. but death and expense. For al-Qaeda it has radicalized the Muslim world and created recruits. Reference and Complete Article .... *Neocon Treason Five American Presidencies Waring Against Iraq This is the 14th year of the War Against Iraq (including the embargo years.) As of this writing, the insurgency is able to mount an average of 100 bombing attacks a week; 400 a month, killing scores of Iraqi civilians. These attacks are continuing unabated despite 90% of all funds allocated to Iraq having been spent on security not for Iraqi infrastructure. (A total of 56 billion dollars has actually been spent in Iraq. Where is the rest of the money?) In Iraq, for every dead U.S. soldier, there are 14 other deaths, 93 percent of them are civilian. But those things happen in war, the story says. It's all for a greater good, we have to remember. It's all to free them. It's all being done to spread liberty. From where I stand, the only question now is who or what will free us from the 21st century's new definition of bravery. Who will free us from the notion that killing children or their civilian parents takes courage? Reference .... *What the Rest of the World Watched on Inauguration Day Liberator Stumble It!

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Protected Under Luxembourg Law My American Whistling Luxembourg Birds American Bird Man of Luxembourg I live in a Portuguese and suburban part of Luxembourg city, with a few French, Russians, and Italians sprinkled in including some Luxembourgers, mostly seniors. A few years ago I made my mark on my small part of Luxembourg. I taught the local birds to whistle American. Yep. You know cat calls, the whistling at girls all American whistles, and they are not just whistling Dixie. You get it. They been doing it for about three years now. They start about four in the morning, and it goes on till night. At first all the neighbors would gawk out their windows, but now they just have accepted that the Luxembourg birds around me are American singers. It only took a week, and now every new generation of birds picked it up from mom and dad. Which proves that not everything for the birds is just for the birds. Sure in the beginning some of the local French got upset. They started playing their French music way loud, but that attracted even more American singing Luxembourg birds. In fact the neighborhood is quiet now, except for my birds. It seems that loud music in whatever language would attract more American whistling Luxembourg birds. Now I got three generations of Luxembourg birds that nest in the pines behind the house, all along the walkways, up on the chimneys chirping and whistling American style. Some of them swarm up on French roofs that used to give them some competition. The French have given up now. Me, I am just minding my own business, and the birds have taken over, and in this part of Luxembourg amid the French, the Portuguese, the Italians and amongst the local Luxembourgers you will hear American singing and whistling Luxembourg birds day and night. And this species is protected under law. Stumble It!

For a change of pace. For all you RIGHT WINGERS that are not getting equal time on this blog ... here is your Corner. *American Right Wing Redneck Freedom Radio Just click & play, and don't forget your guns. (Archived and Live Broadcasts) Stumble It!

Hillarious Videos That Are Sick Because You Are .... *Most Popular Comedy (Click Skip Ad. Take your choice.) *Chicken of the Sea *Madness Combat *Bike Kill *Stupid Biker *Homepride Before A Fall *Chinese Takeaway *Smoking Kills *Star Wars Redone Stupid *Used Cars *Cheat Death *Our President *Too Much Sex Part 1 *Too Much Sex Part 2 *Canadian Legs *Crash,Smash *More Crash,Smash *News Lady *Stick Up *Blow Darts *Budlight *Pepsi Truck *Dancing Groove *Super Bowl Bear *Desert Island *Pepsi Ad *GoDaddy *His Girlfriend *Special French Fries *Getting Robbed *Superheroes *Talking With Baby *Everyone Wants To Be a Clysdale *Old Man Henkins Never Throws Back *Caught Eating Subs *Mamas Boy *If I Was A Rich Girl *New Cadillac Looks Sweet *Parrot Keeps Guys Away *Working With Monkeys *Rich and Smooth *Grabbing A Heineken *The Sun Will Come Out Tommorrow *Wondering What Clothes To Wear *Tobasco Girl is Smokin Hot *Killing The Cat *Monkey and Whoppee Cushion *Designated Driver *Monkey Sucking Up To The Boss *Lipstick Stumble It!

Warning Extreme Violence .... *Banned by the Feds Video (Click Watch Now, then click Video Under Now Playing) *GI's Killing Iraqi Gooks Like In the Old Days Video (Later turned out to be Iraqi Farmers) *GI's Take No Prisoners Video Warning Extreme Violence .... *Terrorist War Videos *Islamist Terrorist Videos Stumble It!

Europe Where Rebels Race Americans In Europe Raising Hell (updated) *Getaway In Stockholm and Raise Hell Video *Getaway In Stockholm and Raise More Hell Video *Burn Rubber & Rip Asphalt Videos *the best car racing videos *Car Video Archives Pick & Play *European Super Truck Racing Videos (5 Instant Play Videos) *At the Strip Dozens of Instant Videos (Click the Pics & Race) Stumble It!

Video: Secret Wars of the CIA: SIX MILLION KILLED IN THE THIRD WORLD

over 6 million people have died in CIA covert actions, and this was in the late 1980's. *THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA VIDEO *CIA Audio Reports The government and military of the United States of America have committed massive acts of international terrorism and brutal genocide — from 1899 to the present day. Bureaucrats of the State After all, CIA intelligence officers are bureaucrats of the state. Was he going to do something awful to me in the name of the state, when I was not a criminal and had done nothing illegal? Matthiessen, like William Buckley, the founder the National Review, were, like many in the CIA of that generation, recruited out of Yale, part of the elite corps of intellectuals who were going to run the world along with David Rockefeller. Their goal was a super-state, in which the economy and the culture would be run for the benefit of a handful of the self-appointed chosen. It is no accident that this has culminated in the American occupation of Iraq, with the plans for world domination set out yet again, after it was derailed by the debacle of Vietnam, in the Project for a New American Century. With George W. Bush, of Yale and Skull and Bones, at the head of the project, the dream lives on. Except it is not a dream. It is a nightmare that turned America into a kind of police state. And it has exploded. *The Real Agenda George W. Bush’s re-election was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—during his second term. Former Head of the CIA The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way. Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region. Bush’s re-election is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America’s support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. Interview With An Insider According to a former high-level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second-guessing. “This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.” Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is Rumsfeld who has directed its implementation and has absorbed much of the public criticism when things went wrong—whether it was prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib or lack of sufficient armor plating for G.I.s’ vehicles in Iraq. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for Rumsfeld’s dismissal, and he is not widely admired inside the military. Nonetheless, his reappointment as Defense Secretary was never in doubt. Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon’s control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia. The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’—it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs”—the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.) In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’ ” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.” For more than a year, France, Germany, Britain, and other countries in the European Union have seen preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon as a race against time—and against the Bush Administration. They have been negotiating with the Iranian leadership to give up its nuclear-weapons ambitions in exchange for economic aid and trade benefits. Iran has agreed to temporarily halt its enrichment programs, which generate fuel for nuclear power plants but also could produce weapons-grade fissile material. (Iran claims that such facilities are legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or N.P.T., to which it is a signator, and that it has no intention of building a bomb.) But the goal of the current round of talks, which began in December in Brussels, is to persuade Tehran to go further, and dismantle its machinery. Iran insists, in return, that it needs to see some concrete benefits from the Europeans—oil-production technology, heavy-industrial equipment, and perhaps even permission to purchase a fleet of Airbuses. (Iran has been denied access to technology and many goods owing to sanctions.) The Europeans have been urging the Bush Administration to join in these negotiations. The Administration has refused to do so. The civilian leadership in the Pentagon has argued that no diplomatic progress on the Iranian nuclear threat will take place unless there is a credible threat of military action. “The neocons say negotiations are a bad deal,” a senior official of the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) told me. “And the only thing the Iranians understand is pressure. And that they also need to be whacked.” CIA In the Field The core problem is that Iran has successfully hidden the extent of its nuclear program, and its progress. Many Western intelligence agencies, including those of the United States, believe that Iran is at least three to five years away from a capability to independently produce nuclear warheads—although its work on a missile-delivery system is far more advanced. Iran is also widely believed by Western intelligence agencies and the I.A.E.A. to have serious technical problems with its weapons system, most notably in the production of the hexafluoride gas needed to fabricate nuclear warheads. A retired senior C.I.A. official, one of many who left the agency recently, told me that he was familiar with the assessments, and confirmed that Iran is known to be having major difficulties in its weapons work. He also acknowledged that the agency’s timetable for a nuclear Iran matches the European estimates—assuming that Iran gets no outside help. “The big wild card for us is that you don’t know who is capable of filling in the missing parts for them,” the recently retired official said. “North Korea? Pakistan? We don’t know what parts are missing.” One Western diplomat told me that the Europeans believed they were in what he called a “lose-lose position” as long as the United States refuses to get involved. “France, Germany, and the U.K. cannot succeed alone, and everybody knows it,” the diplomat said. “If the U.S. stays outside, we don’t have enough leverage, and our effort will collapse.” The alternative would be to go to the Security Council, but any resolution imposing sanctions would likely be vetoed by China or Russia, and then “the United Nations will be blamed and the Americans will say, ‘The only solution is to bomb.’ ” A European Ambassador noted that President Bush is scheduled to visit Europe in February, and that there has been public talk from the White House about improving the President’s relationship with America’s E.U. allies. In that context, the Ambassador told me, “I’m puzzled by the fact that the United States is not helping us in our program. How can Washington maintain its stance without seriously taking into account the weapons issue?” The Israeli government is, not surprisingly, skeptical of the European approach. Silvan Shalom, the Foreign Minister, said in an interview last week in Jerusalem,with another New Yorker journalist, “I don’t like what’s happening. We were encouraged at first when the Europeans got involved. For a long time, they thought it was just Israel’s problem. But then they saw that the [Iranian] missiles themselves were longer range and could reach all of Europe, and they became very concerned. Their attitude has been to use the carrot and the stick—but all we see so far is the carrot.” He added, “If they can’t comply, Israel cannot live with Iran having a nuclear bomb.” In a recent essay, Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (and a supporter of the Administration), articulated the view that force, or the threat of it, was a vital bargaining tool with Iran. Clawson wrote that if Europe wanted coöperation with the Bush Administration it “would do well to remind Iran that the military option remains on the table.” He added that the argument that the European negotiations hinged on Washington looked like “a pre-emptive excuse for the likely breakdown of the E.U.-Iranian talks.” In a subsequent conversation with me, Clawson suggested that, if some kind of military action was inevitable, “it would be much more in Israel’s interest—and Washington’s—to take covert action. The style of this Administration is to use overwhelming force—‘shock and awe.’ But we get only one bite of the apple.” There are many military and diplomatic experts who dispute the notion that military action, on whatever scale, is the right approach. Shahram Chubin, an Iranian scholar who is the director of research at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, told me, “It’s a fantasy to think that there’s a good American or Israeli military option in Iran.” He went on, “The Israeli view is that this is an international problem. ‘You do it,’ they say to the West. ‘Otherwise, our Air Force will take care of it.’ ” In 1981, the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor, setting its nuclear program back several years. But the situation now is both more complex and more dangerous, Chubin said. The Osirak bombing “drove the Iranian nuclear-weapons program underground, to hardened, dispersed sites,” he said. “You can’t be sure after an attack that you’ll get away with it. The U.S. and Israel would not be certain whether all the sites had been hit, or how quickly they’d be rebuilt. Meanwhile, they’d be waiting for an Iranian counter-attack that could be military or terrorist or diplomatic. Iran has long-range missiles and ties to Hezbollah, which has drones—you can’t begin to think of what they’d do in response.” Chubin added that Iran could also renounce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. “It’s better to have them cheating within the system,” he said. “Otherwise, as victims, Iran will walk away from the treaty and inspections while the rest of the world watches the N.P.T. unravel before their eyes.” The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,” the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me. Some of the missions involve extraordinary co-operation. For example, the former high-level intelligence official told me that an American commando task force has been set up in South Asia and is now working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had dealt with Iranian counterparts. (In 2003, the I.A.E.A. disclosed that Iran had been secretly receiving nuclear technology from Pakistan for more than a decade, and had withheld that information from inspectors.) The American task force, aided by the information from Pakistan, has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations. The task-force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices—known as sniffers—capable of sampling the atmosphere for radioactive emissions and other evidence of nuclear-enrichment programs. Getting such evidence is a pressing concern for the Bush Administration. The former high-level intelligence official told me, “They don’t want to make any W.M.D. intelligence mistakes, as in Iraq. The Republicans can’t have two of those. There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.” The official added that the government of Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani President, has won a high price for its coöperation—American assurance that Pakistan will not have to hand over A. Q. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, to the I.A.E.A. or to any other international authorities for questioning. For two decades, Khan has been linked to a vast consortium of nuclear-black-market activities. Last year, Musharraf professed to be shocked when Khan, in the face of overwhelming evidence, “confessed” to his activities. A few days later, Musharraf pardoned him, and so far he has refused to allow the I.A.E.A. or American intelligence to interview him. Khan is now said to be living under house arrest in a villa in Islamabad. “It’s a deal—a trade-off,” the former high-level intelligence official explained. “ ‘Tell us what you know about Iran and we will let your A. Q. Khan guys go.’ It’s the neoconservatives’ version of short-term gain at long-term cost. They want to prove that Bush is the anti-terrorism guy who can handle Iran and the nuclear threat, against the long-term goal of eliminating the black market for nuclear proliferation.” The agreement comes at a time when Musharraf, according to a former high-level Pakistani diplomat, has authorized the expansion of Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons arsenal. “Pakistan still needs parts and supplies, and needs to buy them in the clandestine market,” the former diplomat said. “The U.S. has done nothing to stop it.” There has also been close, and largely unacknowledged, coöperation with Israel. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon said that the Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran. (After Osirak, Iran situated many of its nuclear sites in remote areas of the east, in an attempt to keep them out of striking range of other countries, especially Israel. Distance no longer lends such protection, however: Israel has acquired three submarines capable of launching cruise missiles and has equipped some of its aircraft with additional fuel tanks, putting Israeli F-16I fighters within the range of most Iranian targets.) “They believe that about three-quarters of the potential targets can be destroyed from the air, and a quarter are too close to population centers, or buried too deep, to be targeted,” the consultant said. Inevitably, he added, some suspicious sites need to be checked out by American or Israeli commando teams—in on-the-ground surveillance—before being targeted. CIA Standard Issue The Pentagon’s contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are also being updated. Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military’s war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. Updating the plan makes sense, whether or not the Administration intends to act, because the geopolitics of the region have changed dramatically in the last three years. Previously, an American invasion force would have had to enter Iran by sea, by way of the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman; now troops could move in on the ground, from Afghanistan or Iraq. Commando units and other assets could be introduced through new bases in the Central Asian republics. It is possible that some of the American officials who talk about the need to eliminate Iran’s nuclear infrastructure are doing so as part of a propaganda campaign aimed at pressuring Iran to give up its weapons planning. If so, the signals are not always clear. President Bush, who after 9/11 famously depicted Iran as a member of the “axis of evil,” is now publicly emphasizing the need for diplomacy to run its course. “We don’t have much leverage with the Iranians right now,” the President said at a news conference late last year. “Diplomacy must be the first choice, and always the first choice of an administration trying to solve an issue of . . . nuclear armament. And we’ll continue to press on diplomacy.” In my interviews over the past two months, I was given a much harsher view. The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans’ negotiated approach cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration will act. “We’re not dealing with a set of National Security Council option papers here,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “They’ve already passed that wicket. It’s not if we’re going to do anything against Iran. They’re doing it.” The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran’s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. “Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement,” the consultant told me. “The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse” —like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said. “The idea that an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would produce a popular uprising is extremely illinformed,” said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration. “You have to understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that’s technologically sophisticated.” Leverett, who is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place, “will produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying around the regime.” Rumsfeld planned and lobbied for more than two years before getting Presidential authority, in a series of findings and executive orders, to use military commandos for covert operations. One of his first steps was bureaucratic: to shift control of an undercover unit, known then as the Gray Fox (it has recently been given a new code name), from the Army to the Special Operations Command (socom), in Tampa. Gray Fox was formally assigned to socom in July, 2002, at the instigation of Rumsfeld’s office, which meant that the undercover unit would have a single commander for administration and operational deployment. Then, last fall, Rumsfeld’s ability to deploy the commandos expanded. According to a Pentagon consultant, an Execute Order on the Global War on Terrorism (referred to throughout the government as gwot) was issued at Rumsfeld’s direction. The order specifically authorized the military “to find and finish” terrorist targets, the consultant said. It included a target list that cited Al Qaeda network members, Al Qaeda senior leadership, and other high-value targets. The consultant said that the order had been cleared throughout the national-security bureaucracy in Washington. In late November, 2004, the Times reported that Bush had set up an interagency group to study whether it “would best serve the nation” to give the Pentagon complete control over the C.I.A.’s own élite paramilitary unit, which has operated covertly in trouble spots around the world for decades. The panel’s conclusions, due in February, are foregone, in the view of many former C.I.A. officers. “It seems like it’s going to happen,” Howard Hart, who was chief of the C.I.A.’s Paramilitary Operations Division before retiring in 1991, told me. There was other evidence of Pentagon encroachment. Two former C.I.A. clandestine officers, Vince Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi, who publish Intelligence Brief, a newsletter for their business clients, reported last month on the existence of a broad counter-terrorism Presidential finding that permitted the Pentagon “to operate unilaterally in a number of countries where there is a perception of a clear and evident terrorist threat. . . . A number of the countries are friendly to the U.S. and are major trading partners. Most have been cooperating in the war on terrorism.” The two former officers listed some of the countries—Algeria, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and Malaysia. (I was subsequently told by the former high-level intelligence official that Tunisia is also on the list.) Giraldi, who served three years in military intelligence before joining the C.I.A., said that he was troubled by the military’s expanded covert assignment. “I don’t think they can handle the cover,” he told me. “They’ve got to have a different mind-set. They’ve got to handle new roles and get into foreign cultures and learn how other people think. If you’re going into a village and shooting people, it doesn’t matter,” Giraldi added. “But if you’re running operations that involve finesse and sensitivity, the military can’t do it. Which is why these kind of operations were always run out of the agency.” I was told that many Special Operations officers also have serious misgivings. Rumsfeld and two of his key deputies, Stephen Cambone, the Under-secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, will be part of the chain of command for the new commando operations. Relevant members of the House and Senate intelligence committees have been briefed on the Defense Department’s expanded role in covert affairs, a Pentagon adviser assured me, but he did not know how extensive the briefings had been. “I’m conflicted about the idea of operating without congressional oversight,” the Pentagon adviser said. “But I’ve been told that there will be oversight down to the specific operation.” A second Pentagon adviser agreed, with a significant caveat. “There are reporting requirements,” he said. “But to execute the finding we don’t have to go back and say, ‘We’re going here and there.’ No nitty-gritty detail and no micromanagement.” The legal questions about the Pentagon’s right to conduct covert operations without informing Congress have not been resolved. “It’s a very, very gray area,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a West Point graduate who served as the C.I.A.’s general counsel in the mid-nineteen-nineties. “Congress believes it voted to include all such covert activities carried out by the armed forces. The military says, ‘No, the things we’re doing are not intelligence actions under the statute but necessary military steps authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to “prepare the battlefield.” ’ ” Referring to his days at the C.I.A., Smith added, “We were always careful not to use the armed forces in a covert action without a Presidential finding. The Bush Administration has taken a much more aggressive stance.” In his conversation with me, Smith emphasized that he was unaware of the military’s current plans for expanding covert action. But he said, “Congress has always worried that the Pentagon is going to get us involved in some military misadventure that nobody knows about.” Under Rumsfeld’s new approach, I was told, U.S. military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists. This could potentially involve organizing and carrying out combat operations, or even terrorist activities. Some operations will likely take place in nations in which there is an American diplomatic mission, with an Ambassador and a C.I.A. station chief, the Pentagon consultant said. The Ambassador and the station chief would not necessarily have a need to know, under the Pentagon’s current interpretation of its reporting requirement. The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls “action teams” in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. “Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. “We founded them and we financed them,” he said. “The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.” A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, “We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.” One of the rationales for such tactics was spelled out in a series of articles by John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, and a consultant on terrorism for the rand corporation. “It takes a network to fight a network,” Arquilla wrote in a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle: When conventional military operations and bombing failed to defeat the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s, the British formed teams of friendly Kikuyu tribesmen who went about pretending to be terrorists. These “pseudo gangs,” as they were called, swiftly threw the Mau Mau on the defensive, either by befriending and then ambushing bands of fighters or by guiding bombers to the terrorists’ camps. What worked in Kenya a half-century ago has a wonderful chance of undermining trust and recruitment among today’s terror networks. Forming new pseudo gangs should not be difficult. “If a confused young man from Marin County can join up with Al Qaeda,” Arquilla wrote, referring to John Walker Lindh, the twenty-year-old Californian who was seized in Afghanistan, “think what professional operatives might do.” A few pilot covert operations were conducted last year, one Pentagon adviser told me, and a terrorist cell in Algeria was “rolled up” with American help. The adviser was referring, apparently, to the capture of Ammari Saifi, known as Abderrezak le Para, the head of a North African terrorist network affiliated with Al Qaeda. But at the end of the year there was no agreement within the Defense Department about the rules of engagement. “The issue is approval for the final authority,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “Who gets to say ‘Get this’ or ‘Do this’?” A retired four-star general said, “The basic concept has always been solid, but how do you insure that the people doing it operate within the concept of the law? This is pushing the edge of the envelope.” The general added, “It’s the oversight. And you’re not going to get Warner”—John Warner, of Virginia, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee—“and those guys to exercise oversight. This whole thing goes to the Fourth Deck.” He was referring to the floor in the Pentagon where Rumsfeld and Cambone have their offices. “It’s a finesse to give power to Rumsfeld—giving him the right to act swiftly, decisively, and lethally,” the first Pentagon adviser told me. “It’s a global free-fire zone.” The Pentagon has tried to work around the limits on covert activities before. In the early nineteen-eighties, a covert Army unit was set up and authorized to operate overseas with minimal oversight. The results were disastrous. The Special Operations program was initially known as Intelligence Support Activity, or I.S.A., and was administered from a base near Washington (as was, later, Gray Fox). It was established soon after the failed rescue, in April, 1980, of the American hostages in Iran, who were being held by revolutionary students after the Islamic overthrow of the Shah’s regime. At first, the unit was kept secret from many of the senior generals and civilian leaders in the Pentagon, as well as from many members of Congress. It was eventually deployed in the Reagan Administration’s war against the Sandinista government, in Nicaragua. It was heavily committed to supporting the Contras. By the mid-eighties, however, the I.S.A.’s operations had been curtailed, and several of its senior officers were courtmartialled following a series of financial scandals, some involving arms deals. The affair was known as “the Yellow Fruit scandal,” after the code name given to one of the I.S.A.’s cover organizations—and in many ways the group’s procedures laid the groundwork for the Iran-Contra scandal. Despite the controversy surrounding Yellow Fruit, the I.S.A. was kept intact as an undercover unit by the Army. “But we put so many restrictions on it,” the second Pentagon adviser said. “In I.S.A., if you wanted to travel fifty miles you had to get a special order. And there were certain areas, such as Lebanon, where they could not go.” The adviser acknowledged that the current operations are similar to those two decades earlier, with similar risks—and, as he saw it, similar reasons for taking the risks. “What drove them then, in terms of Yellow Fruit, was that they had no intelligence on Iran,” the adviser told me. “They had no knowledge of Tehran and no people on the ground who could prepare the battle space.” Rumsfeld’s decision to revive this approach stemmed, once again, from a failure of intelligence in the Middle East, the adviser said. The Administration believed that the C.I.A. was unable, or unwilling, to provide the military with the information it needed to effectively challenge stateless terrorism. “One of the big challenges was that we didn’t have Humint”—human intelligence—“collection capabilities in areas where terrorists existed,” the adviser told me. “Because the C.I.A. claimed to have such a hold on Humint, the way to get around them, rather than take them on, was to claim that the agency didn’t do Humint to support Special Forces operations overseas. The C.I.A. fought it.” Referring to Rumsfeld’s new authority for covert operations, the first Pentagon adviser told me, “It’s not empowering military intelligence. It’s emasculating the C.I.A.” A former senior C.I.A. officer depicted the agency’s eclipse as predictable. “For years, the agency bent over backward to integrate and coördinate with the Pentagon,” the former officer said. “We just caved and caved and got what we deserved. It is a fact of life today that the Pentagon is a five-hundred-pound gorilla and the C.I.A. director is a chimpanzee.” There was pressure from the White House, too. A former C.I.A. clandestine-services officer told me that, in the months after the resignation of the agency’s director George Tenet, in June, 2004, the White House began “coming down critically” on analysts in the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Intelligence (D.I.) and demanded “to see more support for the Administration’s political position.” Porter Goss, Tenet’s successor, engaged in what the recently retired C.I.A. official described as a “political purge” in the D.I. Among the targets were a few senior analysts who were known to write dissenting papers that had been forwarded to the White House. The recently retired C.I.A. official said, “The White House carefully reviewed the political analyses of the D.I. so they could sort out the apostates from the true believers.” Some senior analysts in the D.I. have turned in their resignations—quietly, and without revealing the extent of the disarray. The White House solidified its control over intelligence last month, when it forced last-minute changes in the intelligence-reform bill. The legislation, based substantially on recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, originally gave broad powers, including authority over intelligence spending, to a new national-intelligence director. (The Pentagon controls roughly eighty per cent of the intelligence budget.) A reform bill passed in the Senate by a vote of 96-2. Before the House voted, however, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld balked. The White House publicly supported the legislation, but House Speaker Dennis Hastert refused to bring a House version of the bill to the floor for a vote—ostensibly in defiance of the President, though it was widely understood in Congress that Hastert had been delegated to stall the bill. After intense White House and Pentagon lobbying, the legislation was rewritten. The bill that Congress approved sharply reduced the new director’s power, in the name of permitting the Secretary of Defense to maintain his “statutory responsibilities.” Fred Kaplan, in the online magazine Slate, described the real issues behind Hastert’s action, quoting a congressional aide who expressed amazement as White House lobbyists bashed the Senate bill and came up “with all sorts of ludicrous reasons why it was unacceptable.” “Rummy’s plan was to get a compromise in the bill in which the Pentagon keeps its marbles and the C.I.A. loses theirs,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Then all the pieces of the puzzle fall in place. He gets authority for covert action that is not attributable, the ability to directly task national-intelligence assets”—including the many intelligence satellites that constantly orbit the world. “Rumsfeld will no longer have to refer anything through the government’s intelligence wringer,” the former official went on. “The intelligence system was designed to put competing agencies in competition. What’s missing will be the dynamic tension that insures everyone’s priorities—in the C.I.A., the D.O.D., the F.B.I., and even the Department of Homeland Security—are discussed. The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what he’s doing so they can ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ or ‘What are your priorities?’ Now he can keep all of the mattress mice out of it.” From .... THE COMING WARS by SEYMOUR M. HERSH What the Pentagon can now do in secret. Issue of 2005-01-24 and 31 Posted 2005-01-17 Update .... CNN) -- A book written by a top CIA counterterrorism official alleges that the Bush administration has bungled the war on terror, and because of poor decisions the United States faces a choice in Iraq and Afghanistan "between war and endless war." Written by a high-level counterterrorism expert and published under the name "Anonymous," the book "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror" is unique in that it was written by an official still working for the CIA. And with the book slated to be released next week, the author has already appeared -- in shadow -- on a Sunday political talk show to defend his work. On ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopolous," the author accused some senior officials in the U.S. intelligence community of "a great deal of moral or bureaucratic cowardice" in dealing with the war on terror. Although he was relatively muted on the topic of George Tenet, the outgoing director of the CIA, the author was unsparing in his criticism of the Bush administration's decision to wait a month after the September 11, 2001, attacks before going to war in Afghanistan. "We were facing a government, the Taliban, which was basically a rural insurgency trying to govern cities, and al Qaeda, which is a 20-year-old insurgency. If you were going to hit them, sir, you had to hit them on the 11th or the 12th or the 13th." "By the time the 7th of October rolled along, most of those forces had been dispersed into the countryside, into Pakistan, into Iran, overseas to other countries. There was no 'there' left when we went there," he said. In his book, the author labeled the invasion of Iraq a "Christmas gift" to Osama bin Laden and said the country has become a "Mujahadeen magnet" attracting Muslims from around the world to fight the occupying U.S. forces. In an interview on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer," Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to comment on the author, but said that while there is an insurgency in Iraq, "I think what we are also seeing is that the world is coming together" and developing an "understanding that we have to deal with these kinds of terrorist organizations and not just write it all off to Muslim extremism." Also appearing on "This Week," national security advisor Condoleezza Rice refused to comment specifically on "Anonymous" because, "I don't know who Anonymous is." However Rice offered a defense of Bush administration policies in the war on terror and in Iraq. "What I can say is that a free Iraq, an Iraq in which these killers realize that we're moving toward a democratic future for Iraq which can be the linchpin for a different kind of Middle East, is going to frustrate, not improve, their plans." The book charges that Saddam Hussein posed no immediate threat to the United States; that the war in Iraq undermined the overall war against terror and actually played into bin Laden's hands; and that the United States is losing that war on terror. The author also predicts al Qaeda will again attack the continental United States and that it will be even more damaging than the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. The author says the biggest mistake made after 9/11 was that top intelligence community leaders were not fired. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida, who serves on the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, agreed. "As we try to prepare ourselves in this new era of terrorism, we have to just assume that we're going to have an attack," Nelson said. "And the only way that we prevent it is to have accurate and timely intelligence." Read more ... *CIA insider slams Bush antiterror policies Video ... *Covert Operations in Iran For Possible Military Strike References .... *Documents Concerning the CIA *Torture Photos, Videos a Time-Honored CIA Traditions Resources ... *CIA Covert Operations from 1947 to the Present *CIA Terror Archive *A History of CIA Atrocities *Covert Operations Dossier Paper Trail *CIA COVERT ACTIONS & DRUG TRAFFICKING *CIA’s Covert Afghan War Special Note: Even Lee Harvey Oswald (JFK assassination) worked for the CIA see this link: *Confidential CIA Memo Stumble It!

Iraq War Videos

Iraq War Videos Not On American Media *Video Inside Iraq What You Won't See On American Media (An exclusive, in-depth interview with journalist Dahr Jamail on what is really going on in Iraq) *Iraq War Videos *Iraq War Videos Courtesy of BlackCat Dahr Jamail recognized that Americans were being misled about the US occupation of Iraq, so he went to Iraq to find the truth. After being unembedded in Iraq totaling over 8 months, he returned to the States to tell what he discovered. In this video Dahr Jamail speaks of the horrors of occupation, the use of illegal weapons by American forces, the rip-off of American taxpayers by Bechtel and other US corporations, the shabby and biased media coverage of the situation by US media, and of the resilient determination of the Iraqi people to be free from foreign occupation. *Inside Iraq What You won't read on American Media

American Socialism; For Corporations & Capitalists Only

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching. It unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. The money powers preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me & the financial institutions at the rear, the latter is my greatest foe. Corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed." - Abraham Lincoln, letter to William Elkins, Nov 21, 1864 "Don't Worry. The Idea is To Get Rid of Welfare as They Know it (Poor & Needy,) Not as We (Corporations & Rich) Know It." This country has a $7 trillion national debt, a growing deficit and is borrowing money from the Social Security Trust Fund in order to fund government services. We can no longer afford to provide over $125 billion every year in corporate welfare - tax breaks, subsidies and other wasteful spending - that goes to some of the largest, most profitable corporations in America. *Congressman Sanders on US Corporate Welfare Giveaways ... if we eliminated corporate welfare, that alone would allow for the income tax to be reduced by nearly 1/2 for those making between $27,682 and $55,225, and abolished entirely for those making below $27,682. This would benefit wage-earners enormously by offsetting the regressive nature of the payroll tax, and would benefit small businesses by eliminating the anticompetitive nature of corporate welfare spending. The death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown in a Balkans plane crash exposed the real reason President Clinton sent American troops to Bosnia: to make the world safe for corporate welfare. Standard American Fighter Sections built by "NBC, Exxon, ConAgra, Monsanto, WalMart, Pfizer" (May 2004 - Over the past hundred years our government has sent troops into battle on foreign soil numerous times. A reason frequently given to the public is that it was necessary to bring freedom and relief to an oppressed people, or more recently to protect the homeland. With a few exceptions like World War II and Afghanistan, the actual underlying reasons have usually been corporate economics.) *Subsidizing Corporate Economics Thru War An aspect of the so-called Dayton Peace Accords, which led to the deployment of U.S. troops, was an initial installment of $600 million in U.S. foreign aid, much of it for construction contracts. As was the case in Vietnam, Kuwait, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, and now Bosnia, America's corporate elite are shamelessly bilking the taxpayers and putting American lives at risk, all under the guise of patriotism and "nation building." *Ron Brown's Corporate Welfare Scam *Why We Need to Abolish Corporate Welfare Corporate welfare describes the billions (if not trillions) of dollars in grants, subsidies, padded contracts and other government assistance handed to corporations by the U.S. and other governments. Corporate welfare in the United States likely started in earnest with the distribution to railroad companies of lands, often including those used by indigenous nations. Universities also were granted vast tracks of land, from which timber and other resources were sold below market price to the universities' industry friends. Mining companies in the United States are among the largest beneficiaries, granted the privilege of mining private and even public lands without paying so much as an excise tax in many states. The United States is among a very few nations where mineral resources can be privately held and where mineral development is not taxed. While the United States complains loudly about "trade barriers" when other nations impose a tarrif to protect agricultural interests, America's corporate leaders enjoy durable wealth from one of the largest corporate land-and-resource grabs in world history - the seizure of the American West. Some sites, like the Black Hills of North Dakota, are being contracted as corporate welfare handouts to mineral companies even before the native residents agree to an imposed settlement intended to quiet their complaints. Using the Halliburton Company as a prime example of Corporate Welfare, the Center for Cooperative Research says "Manipulating U.S. foreign policy isn't the only strategy in Halliburton's repertoire of means to securing profits. Another method that has apparently proven extremely successful is doing business with the government and bidding on contracts financed by U.S. dominated bilateral and multilateral aid agencies. Although Dick Cheney had once lashed out at Joe Lieberman saying that his success at Halliburton "had absolutely nothing to do with the government," the real facts have shown otherwise. Corporate welfare may not always involve direct transfers of cash to companies. It may take the form of laws that offer below-the-radar tax write-offs and corporate tax evasion schemes, as several articles here *demonstrate *Corporate Welfare Research Index Get Tough So Corporate Welfare Can Prosper Whilst the Poor & Disenfranchised Disappear Onto the Streets Corporate leaders have abandoned the old fashioned methods of social control which were embodied in the New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. Beginning in the Early 80’s , corporate elites have been relying increasingly on a fundamentally different “get tough” approach or strategy designed specifically to strengthen corporate power over people by making them less secure. This new strategy, economic warfare against the working class, is what motivates corporate leaders’ new unbridled enthusiasm for the so-called “discipline” of the free market, which they frequently use to justify not only market-driven health care but also downsizing and attacks on the social safety net. *Economic Warfare On the Poor For Social Control WELFARE FOR THE RICH – In America the Free Market System is treated like a sacred principle. Don’t be fooled, it’s a fucking hoax. The US economy is rigged. Our Economics textbooks tell us that all our economic problems will be cured by the functioning of the free market which through natural competition will cause the best products and the best prices to prevail for the betterment of all. It’s total bullshit!! Remember all that crap you learned in civics class about “laissez faire” economics. Well forget it. The reality is quite different. Government intervention has always played a central role in the modern capitalist system. (think of it as “socialism for the rich”, & “laissez faire” economics for the rest of us) Government subsidies for private corporations are disguised under the Pentagon System or “DEFENSE’ which takes half of every tax dollar. Public subsidies(taxes paid by us) subsidize R & D (research & development) in the computer, electronics & aeronautical industries, just to name a few. Other examples of industries which rely upon public subsidies are the biotechnology, pharmaceutical industries, & agribusiness. In other words, “a complex system of tax laws, government manipulation of public money, regulations and other magic tricks insure that certain businesses will thrive regardless of whether the free market will support them or not.” *Downsize This Right after President Clinton signed the new welfare reform bill, its full meaning became crystal clear. This new law isn't just about weakening the labor movement in the United States. It isn't only about lowering workers' wages overall. It isn't even just about kicking impoverished women and their children off welfare assistance. It's also about transferring billions of dollars to Big Business as an entire sector which was once in the public economy and publicly managed passes into private hands. Clinton's signature on the legislation to abolish federal welfare assistance in America has created a feeding frenzy among private corporations seeking to profit directly from the destruction of social benefits. For business sharks in America, welfare "reform" is being viewed as a lucrative new field that promises to become a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. It is, no doubt, becoming one of the largest transfers of public sector operations into private hands, giving one new meaning to the term "corporate welfare." "The new welfare law has many corporate welfare provisions. The changes open up new markets for companies to sell their services, while providing a pool of free labor. As the government moves to restrict welfare for poor people, they're expanding it for the corporations," stated Cecilia Perry, public policy analyst. *Whispering In Clinton's Left Ear Welfare Reform is becoming one of the largest transfers of public sector operations into private hands. *Striking It Rich in the Welfare-Biz You may be thinking, Well, at least my taxes are going to help catch terrorists ($200 billion worth), right? Wrong. the $100 billion extra we scrimped from other programs to hand the military? Most goes to contractors who sell the U.S. overpriced and sometimes obsolete weapons systems. So the military budget (before the extras, $393 billion in 2003) that we authorize so that we’ll be protected is really being used to pad contractors’ pockets and secure oil in the Middle East. And it’s not the people driving gas-guzzling hummers who pay for this. Instead of being sanctioned for increasing our dependency on oil, they enjoy a $25,000 tax break. *TAKE THE RICH OFF WELFARE IF YOU THINK that practically everybody favors getting people off the dole, breaking their dependence on the government and making them earn their own keep, think again. Our number one political cliche when it comes to social policies-"get them off welfare"-applies only to the poor, the weak and the vulnerable. Welfare for the rich is thriving in these days of giant deficits, shifts to users' fees and workfare. Corporations pay no taxes, and get yours? You pay their expenses, they keep the profits. Resources .... *The Empire Of The Pigs *High Tech Splat *How to Become a Top Banana *Stop Corporate Welfare! *CORPORATE WELFARE THE FACE, THE CASE, THE REMEDY The battles between Republicans vs. Democrats is a farce to distract the public from the slow usurption of global power, involving all top officials (both parties), top military, mafia, weapons manufacturers, cocaine/opium traffickers, and international bankers. *Gore Vidal Welfare State Audio In the near future, multinational corporations will own everything, from information to cover scanland to social services. The cost of food, fuel, and services will be prohibitive. Cities will become chaotic and dangerous. Climate will be extreme and unpredictable. Environmental protection will become a convenient excuse for corporations to appropriate land and resources. Youth will feel that the greed of older generations robbed them of their future and their present.

Today's American Neo-Con Made

Today's American Neo-Con Made Americans just ignore the devil in the details or (Americans just engage in willful ignorance) I AM not a love-it-or-leave-it American. I'm an in-it-for-the-long-haul American, celebrating progress, lamenting regression, and plugging away for the new and improved. But I'm perplexed about one problem plaguing the state of the union that is particularly resilient to rescue. I'm afraid we are afflicted with an outbreak of shallow thinking in the land. The condition is widespread and the cure is elusive. In our own time -- and especially since the ascendancy of George Bush to the presidency -- "neoconservative" has become a term frequently associated with "in your face attacks," and extreme arrogance. But the heat generated by the term also stands as a backhanded tribute, an acknowledgment that the neoconservative impact has been substantial. It is today too soon to offer a comprehensive assessment of that impact. The discussion of neoconservatism offered here has a more modest objective, namely, to suggest that one aspect of the neoconservative legacy has been to foster the new "Wild West Shootouts around the World," and the emergence of the new American militarism, and the lack of any sizeable American opposition or any mass public outcry concerning American foreign policy. "They love talking about expanding democracy throughout the world (at least, the oil-producing world) but care little about favored authoritarians and tyrants. They are the people who led this country into Iraq where more than 1,600 GIs have been killed (official figure,) not to mention the many thousands wounded in body and mind (30,000) and over 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. But guess what? Virtually no neocon offspring are to be found on the front line in Iraq or Afghanistan. They praise war and warlike virtues and denounce the decadence of intellectuals. They want women to return to children, cooking, and the church. They delight in the profusion of flags: flags on cars, flags on houses, flags worn in lapels. They encourage citizens to inform on their neighbors. They plan to establish a new world order to rival Rome." Referenced from .... *Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire Bush Fantasy Matrix The Bush White House has masterfully used the public's general indifference to all things overseas to its advantage in war and peace - but mostly war. It has successfully reinforced the notion that finessing foreign sensibilities is a fickle experiment at best and citizens need not trouble themselves unduly over multilateral tangos. Moreover, to display its faux affinity for the common man, the administration has boiled down the whole foreign relations thing to one easy understanding. You're either fer or agin' us, said the man from Midland, Texas. Simple, straightforward, and as shallow as they come. Yet it was all the gunslingers in Washington had to say to the world before shooting their way into Baghdad to spread democracy, topple an evil empire, and destroy weapons of mass destruction. Well, one out of three ain't bad. And it's good enough for a homeland largely afraid to doubt the wisdom of a done deal or question a kick-ass commander in chief gunning for retribution in the Middle East. Despite protests to the contrary, people preferred to believe that the President must know more than they do about dreadful Iraq and were content to leave it at that. Neo-Con Commandments Three years and more than 1,600 American deaths later (official figure,) with the U.S. nowhere close to escaping the warfare it started there, Americans still nod like lemmings when the President insists "democracy is on the march" amid the rubble of Iraq and resurging Taliban influence in Afghanistan. More Lies & Coverups "Between 40,000 and 50,000 US military personnel are in Iraq despite serious medical conditions that should have ruled them out of combat, according to the National Gulf War Resource Centre. The GI Rights Hotline, which counsels troops, says it fielded 32,000 calls last year from soldiers seeking an exit from the military, or suffering from post-combat stress." .... *American Wounded In the Field "Actually, and I have seen the figures from the Pentagon, over 8,000 are dead ...." *the Real Dead & Wounded "The Americans are losing the war in Iraq and in their frustration have started using chemical weapons and napalm bombs on civilian populations," .... *U.S. using chemical weapons against civilians Frankly, shallow is good enough when too much reflection might bring reality into focus. And if the genuine article is dramatically different from the official version, then what? We live in fast-food times with little patience for complexities or shades of gray. We are not a country predisposed to ponder too many variables in life. The need to know is overrated. Not surprisingly our politicians mirror the society they serve. They craft easy-on-the-ears stump speeches that a first grader could repeat word for word. They perfect catch phrases to sum up everything from war to welfare guaranteed to appease the not-so-inquiring minds of their audiences. And if the malleable masses are spoon-fed disaster packaged as appealing dessert, darned if they don't line up for more. Neo-Con Spooks In the prevailing shallowness of America, the shrewd can inherit the earth. They can lead an anxious but trusting nation into a war of choice by sounding as if they had no other option. They can push through tax breaks that cost trillions and plump up record deficits by sounding as if fiscal restraint would be folly. They can promote private accounts as saving supplements to Social Security by sounding as if personal investment is preferable to government checks, reliability notwithstanding. Shallowness allows schemers to gut environmental programs by sounding as though they advocate them with cleverly named initiatives that only a profit-seeking polluter could love. They can sell their propaganda as mainstream news without disclaimer by sounding sincere in their unorthodox approach to winning friends and influencing voters. They can even obscure the tangled web of deceit that Condi Rice lugs around in first-term baggage by sounding like 2008 could be her year. Next Neo-Con Vice-President And America the beautiful will bite at whatever sounds good or seems right if it's smartly delivered by someone who simply must know more than the average bloke about politics, prosperity, and pre-emptive war. Besides, how wrong can it be when those leading us all off the cliff sound as if pain is precluded altogether? If the consequences of poor policy from fiscal to foreign ever raise the specter of sacrifice, as they surely will and surely are, the shallow won't know what to think. It's that bad and policy makers only pray it gets worse. Neo-Con War On Iraqi Children On U.S. Inauguration Day, most didn't seem to notice. Oh, they played a few clips that night of the American president saying, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." On the front page of The Irish Times was a large four-color picture of a small Iraqi girl. Her little body was a coil of steel. She sat knees up, cowering, screaming madly into the dark night... Reference and Complete Article .... *What the Rest of the World Watched on Inauguration Day Neocon Treason In a chapter that is must reading for every American who thinks President Bush should be reelected, Buchanan asks: "Who are they, the neoconservatives?" When you find out, you will want nothing further to do with the president who sponsored them and gave them unbridled power to launch America into permanent war in the Middle East. The neocons have declared America at war with 1 billion Muslims who have done us no harm. Simultaneously, the neocons destroyed our traditional alliances. Instead of isolating a terrorist enemy, neocons have isolated America. Al-Qaeda is not a state or a country. It is a non-governmental organization that rejects America's decadent culture and opposes the U.S.-Israeli alliance that brutally oppresses Palestinians to the shame of all Muslims. It is impossible to fight al-Qaeda by invading and occupying Muslim countries. Bush's invasion of Iraq has achieved nothing for the U.S. but death and expense. For al-Qaeda it has radicalized the Muslim world and created recruits. Reference and Complete Article .... *Neocon Treason Five American Presidencies Waring Against Iraq This is the 14th year of the War Against Iraq (including the embargo years.) As of this writing, the insurgency is able to mount an average of 100 bombing attacks a week; 400 a month, killing scores of Iraqi civilians. These attacks are continuing unabated despite 90% of all funds allocated to Iraq having been spent on security not for Iraqi infrastructure. (A total of 56 billion dollars has actually been spent in Iraq. Where is the rest of the money?) In Iraq, for every dead U.S. soldier, there are 14 other deaths, 93 percent of them are civilian. But those things happen in war, the story says. It's all for a greater good, we have to remember. It's all to free them. It's all being done to spread liberty. From where I stand, the only question now is who or what will free us from the 21st century's new definition of bravery. Who will free us from the notion that killing children or their civilian parents takes courage? Reference .... *What the Rest of the World Watched on Inauguration Day Liberator

Videos, Mp3's New Music From Europe

Don't Worry Be Happy .... From Europe New MP3's *All Genre MP3 Free *Celtic Free Mp3's *Cool Free Haitian MP3's *Cool Jamaican Jams *3 Irish Tenors Samples & Free Downloads *Free MP3's and Complete Albums *Luxembourg Bands *Mp3 Hangout Don't Worry Be Happy .... From Europe New Music Videos *Metal,Hard Rock Videos *Jazz Smooth & Sexy Videos *New Hot Euro Bands Videos *Hot European Videos/English (click green titles & play) *Sad Song Video (wide screen, color, multi-dimensional classic tear jerker)

For the Birds

Protected Under Luxembourg Law My American Whistling Luxembourg Birds American Bird Man of Luxembourg I live in a Portuguese and suburban part of Luxembourg city, with a few French, Russians, and Italians sprinkled in including some Luxembourgers, mostly seniors. A few years ago I made my mark on my small part of Luxembourg. I taught the local birds to whistle American. Yep. You know cat calls, the whistling at girls all American whistles, and they are not just whistling Dixie. You get it. They been doing it for about three years now. They start about four in the morning, and it goes on till night. At first all the neighbors would gawk out their windows, but now they just have accepted that the Luxembourg birds around me are American singers. It only took a week, and now every new generation of birds picked it up from mom and dad. Which proves that not everything for the birds is just for the birds. Sure in the beginning some of the local French got upset. They started playing their French music way loud, but that attracted even more American singing Luxembourg birds. In fact the neighborhood is quiet now, except for my birds. It seems that loud music in whatever language would attract more American whistling Luxembourg birds. Now I got three generations of Luxembourg birds that nest in the pines behind the house, all along the walkways, up on the chimneys chirping and whistling American style. Some of them swarm up on French roofs that used to give them some competition. The French have given up now. Me, I am just minding my own business, and the birds have taken over, and in this part of Luxembourg amid the French, the Portuguese, the Italians and amongst the local Luxembourgers you will hear American singing and whistling Luxembourg birds day and night. And this species is protected under law.

Radio: American Right Wing Redneck Freedom News

For a change of pace. For all you RIGHT WINGERS that are not getting equal time on this blog ... here is your Corner. *American Right Wing Redneck Freedom Radio Just click & play, and don't forget your guns. (Archived and Live Broadcasts)

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Hillarious Videos That Are Sick Because You Are .... *Most Popular Comedy (Click Skip Ad. Take your choice.) *Chicken of the Sea *Madness Combat *Bike Kill *Stupid Biker *Homepride Before A Fall *Chinese Takeaway *Smoking Kills *Star Wars Redone Stupid *Used Cars *Cheat Death *Our President *Too Much Sex Part 1 *Too Much Sex Part 2 *Canadian Legs *Crash,Smash *More Crash,Smash *News Lady *Stick Up *Blow Darts *Budlight *Pepsi Truck *Dancing Groove *Super Bowl Bear *Desert Island *Pepsi Ad *GoDaddy *His Girlfriend *Special French Fries *Getting Robbed *Superheroes *Talking With Baby *Everyone Wants To Be a Clysdale *Old Man Henkins Never Throws Back *Caught Eating Subs *Mamas Boy *If I Was A Rich Girl *New Cadillac Looks Sweet *Parrot Keeps Guys Away *Working With Monkeys *Rich and Smooth *Grabbing A Heineken *The Sun Will Come Out Tommorrow *Wondering What Clothes To Wear *Tobasco Girl is Smokin Hot *Killing The Cat *Monkey and Whoppee Cushion *Designated Driver *Monkey Sucking Up To The Boss *Lipstick

Videos: Banned By the Feds & Your Mamma

Warning Extreme Violence .... *Banned by the Feds Video (Click Watch Now, then click Video Under Now Playing) *GI's Killing Iraqi Gooks Like In the Old Days Video (Later turned out to be Iraqi Farmers) *GI's Take No Prisoners Video Warning Extreme Violence .... *Terrorist War Videos *Islamist Terrorist Videos

Videos: American Hot Rods Tearing Up Europe

Europe Where Rebels Race Americans In Europe Raising Hell (updated) *Getaway In Stockholm and Raise Hell Video *Getaway In Stockholm and Raise More Hell Video *Burn Rubber & Rip Asphalt Videos *the best car racing videos *Car Video Archives Pick & Play *European Super Truck Racing Videos (5 Instant Play Videos) *At the Strip Dozens of Instant Videos (Click the Pics & Race)

Video: Secret Wars of the CIA: SIX MILLION KILLED IN THE THIRD WORLD

over 6 million people have died in CIA covert actions, and this was in the late 1980's. *THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA VIDEO *CIA Audio Reports The government and military of the United States of America have committed massive acts of international terrorism and brutal genocide — from 1899 to the present day. Bureaucrats of the State After all, CIA intelligence officers are bureaucrats of the state. Was he going to do something awful to me in the name of the state, when I was not a criminal and had done nothing illegal? Matthiessen, like William Buckley, the founder the National Review, were, like many in the CIA of that generation, recruited out of Yale, part of the elite corps of intellectuals who were going to run the world along with David Rockefeller. Their goal was a super-state, in which the economy and the culture would be run for the benefit of a handful of the self-appointed chosen. It is no accident that this has culminated in the American occupation of Iraq, with the plans for world domination set out yet again, after it was derailed by the debacle of Vietnam, in the Project for a New American Century. With George W. Bush, of Yale and Skull and Bones, at the head of the project, the dream lives on. Except it is not a dream. It is a nightmare that turned America into a kind of police state. And it has exploded. *The Real Agenda George W. Bush’s re-election was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—during his second term. Former Head of the CIA The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way. Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region. Bush’s re-election is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America’s support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. Interview With An Insider According to a former high-level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second-guessing. “This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.” Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is Rumsfeld who has directed its implementation and has absorbed much of the public criticism when things went wrong—whether it was prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib or lack of sufficient armor plating for G.I.s’ vehicles in Iraq. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for Rumsfeld’s dismissal, and he is not widely admired inside the military. Nonetheless, his reappointment as Defense Secretary was never in doubt. Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon’s control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia. The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’—it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs”—the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.) In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’ ” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.” For more than a year, France, Germany, Britain, and other countries in the European Union have seen preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon as a race against time—and against the Bush Administration. They have been negotiating with the Iranian leadership to give up its nuclear-weapons ambitions in exchange for economic aid and trade benefits. Iran has agreed to temporarily halt its enrichment programs, which generate fuel for nuclear power plants but also could produce weapons-grade fissile material. (Iran claims that such facilities are legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or N.P.T., to which it is a signator, and that it has no intention of building a bomb.) But the goal of the current round of talks, which began in December in Brussels, is to persuade Tehran to go further, and dismantle its machinery. Iran insists, in return, that it needs to see some concrete benefits from the Europeans—oil-production technology, heavy-industrial equipment, and perhaps even permission to purchase a fleet of Airbuses. (Iran has been denied access to technology and many goods owing to sanctions.) The Europeans have been urging the Bush Administration to join in these negotiations. The Administration has refused to do so. The civilian leadership in the Pentagon has argued that no diplomatic progress on the Iranian nuclear threat will take place unless there is a credible threat of military action. “The neocons say negotiations are a bad deal,” a senior official of the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) told me. “And the only thing the Iranians understand is pressure. And that they also need to be whacked.” CIA In the Field The core problem is that Iran has successfully hidden the extent of its nuclear program, and its progress. Many Western intelligence agencies, including those of the United States, believe that Iran is at least three to five years away from a capability to independently produce nuclear warheads—although its work on a missile-delivery system is far more advanced. Iran is also widely believed by Western intelligence agencies and the I.A.E.A. to have serious technical problems with its weapons system, most notably in the production of the hexafluoride gas needed to fabricate nuclear warheads. A retired senior C.I.A. official, one of many who left the agency recently, told me that he was familiar with the assessments, and confirmed that Iran is known to be having major difficulties in its weapons work. He also acknowledged that the agency’s timetable for a nuclear Iran matches the European estimates—assuming that Iran gets no outside help. “The big wild card for us is that you don’t know who is capable of filling in the missing parts for them,” the recently retired official said. “North Korea? Pakistan? We don’t know what parts are missing.” One Western diplomat told me that the Europeans believed they were in what he called a “lose-lose position” as long as the United States refuses to get involved. “France, Germany, and the U.K. cannot succeed alone, and everybody knows it,” the diplomat said. “If the U.S. stays outside, we don’t have enough leverage, and our effort will collapse.” The alternative would be to go to the Security Council, but any resolution imposing sanctions would likely be vetoed by China or Russia, and then “the United Nations will be blamed and the Americans will say, ‘The only solution is to bomb.’ ” A European Ambassador noted that President Bush is scheduled to visit Europe in February, and that there has been public talk from the White House about improving the President’s relationship with America’s E.U. allies. In that context, the Ambassador told me, “I’m puzzled by the fact that the United States is not helping us in our program. How can Washington maintain its stance without seriously taking into account the weapons issue?” The Israeli government is, not surprisingly, skeptical of the European approach. Silvan Shalom, the Foreign Minister, said in an interview last week in Jerusalem,with another New Yorker journalist, “I don’t like what’s happening. We were encouraged at first when the Europeans got involved. For a long time, they thought it was just Israel’s problem. But then they saw that the [Iranian] missiles themselves were longer range and could reach all of Europe, and they became very concerned. Their attitude has been to use the carrot and the stick—but all we see so far is the carrot.” He added, “If they can’t comply, Israel cannot live with Iran having a nuclear bomb.” In a recent essay, Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (and a supporter of the Administration), articulated the view that force, or the threat of it, was a vital bargaining tool with Iran. Clawson wrote that if Europe wanted coöperation with the Bush Administration it “would do well to remind Iran that the military option remains on the table.” He added that the argument that the European negotiations hinged on Washington looked like “a pre-emptive excuse for the likely breakdown of the E.U.-Iranian talks.” In a subsequent conversation with me, Clawson suggested that, if some kind of military action was inevitable, “it would be much more in Israel’s interest—and Washington’s—to take covert action. The style of this Administration is to use overwhelming force—‘shock and awe.’ But we get only one bite of the apple.” There are many military and diplomatic experts who dispute the notion that military action, on whatever scale, is the right approach. Shahram Chubin, an Iranian scholar who is the director of research at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, told me, “It’s a fantasy to think that there’s a good American or Israeli military option in Iran.” He went on, “The Israeli view is that this is an international problem. ‘You do it,’ they say to the West. ‘Otherwise, our Air Force will take care of it.’ ” In 1981, the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor, setting its nuclear program back several years. But the situation now is both more complex and more dangerous, Chubin said. The Osirak bombing “drove the Iranian nuclear-weapons program underground, to hardened, dispersed sites,” he said. “You can’t be sure after an attack that you’ll get away with it. The U.S. and Israel would not be certain whether all the sites had been hit, or how quickly they’d be rebuilt. Meanwhile, they’d be waiting for an Iranian counter-attack that could be military or terrorist or diplomatic. Iran has long-range missiles and ties to Hezbollah, which has drones—you can’t begin to think of what they’d do in response.” Chubin added that Iran could also renounce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. “It’s better to have them cheating within the system,” he said. “Otherwise, as victims, Iran will walk away from the treaty and inspections while the rest of the world watches the N.P.T. unravel before their eyes.” The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,” the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me. Some of the missions involve extraordinary co-operation. For example, the former high-level intelligence official told me that an American commando task force has been set up in South Asia and is now working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had dealt with Iranian counterparts. (In 2003, the I.A.E.A. disclosed that Iran had been secretly receiving nuclear technology from Pakistan for more than a decade, and had withheld that information from inspectors.) The American task force, aided by the information from Pakistan, has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations. The task-force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices—known as sniffers—capable of sampling the atmosphere for radioactive emissions and other evidence of nuclear-enrichment programs. Getting such evidence is a pressing concern for the Bush Administration. The former high-level intelligence official told me, “They don’t want to make any W.M.D. intelligence mistakes, as in Iraq. The Republicans can’t have two of those. There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.” The official added that the government of Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani President, has won a high price for its coöperation—American assurance that Pakistan will not have to hand over A. Q. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, to the I.A.E.A. or to any other international authorities for questioning. For two decades, Khan has been linked to a vast consortium of nuclear-black-market activities. Last year, Musharraf professed to be shocked when Khan, in the face of overwhelming evidence, “confessed” to his activities. A few days later, Musharraf pardoned him, and so far he has refused to allow the I.A.E.A. or American intelligence to interview him. Khan is now said to be living under house arrest in a villa in Islamabad. “It’s a deal—a trade-off,” the former high-level intelligence official explained. “ ‘Tell us what you know about Iran and we will let your A. Q. Khan guys go.’ It’s the neoconservatives’ version of short-term gain at long-term cost. They want to prove that Bush is the anti-terrorism guy who can handle Iran and the nuclear threat, against the long-term goal of eliminating the black market for nuclear proliferation.” The agreement comes at a time when Musharraf, according to a former high-level Pakistani diplomat, has authorized the expansion of Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons arsenal. “Pakistan still needs parts and supplies, and needs to buy them in the clandestine market,” the former diplomat said. “The U.S. has done nothing to stop it.” There has also been close, and largely unacknowledged, coöperation with Israel. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon said that the Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran. (After Osirak, Iran situated many of its nuclear sites in remote areas of the east, in an attempt to keep them out of striking range of other countries, especially Israel. Distance no longer lends such protection, however: Israel has acquired three submarines capable of launching cruise missiles and has equipped some of its aircraft with additional fuel tanks, putting Israeli F-16I fighters within the range of most Iranian targets.) “They believe that about three-quarters of the potential targets can be destroyed from the air, and a quarter are too close to population centers, or buried too deep, to be targeted,” the consultant said. Inevitably, he added, some suspicious sites need to be checked out by American or Israeli commando teams—in on-the-ground surveillance—before being targeted. CIA Standard Issue The Pentagon’s contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are also being updated. Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military’s war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. Updating the plan makes sense, whether or not the Administration intends to act, because the geopolitics of the region have changed dramatically in the last three years. Previously, an American invasion force would have had to enter Iran by sea, by way of the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman; now troops could move in on the ground, from Afghanistan or Iraq. Commando units and other assets could be introduced through new bases in the Central Asian republics. It is possible that some of the American officials who talk about the need to eliminate Iran’s nuclear infrastructure are doing so as part of a propaganda campaign aimed at pressuring Iran to give up its weapons planning. If so, the signals are not always clear. President Bush, who after 9/11 famously depicted Iran as a member of the “axis of evil,” is now publicly emphasizing the need for diplomacy to run its course. “We don’t have much leverage with the Iranians right now,” the President said at a news conference late last year. “Diplomacy must be the first choice, and always the first choice of an administration trying to solve an issue of . . . nuclear armament. And we’ll continue to press on diplomacy.” In my interviews over the past two months, I was given a much harsher view. The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans’ negotiated approach cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration will act. “We’re not dealing with a set of National Security Council option papers here,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “They’ve already passed that wicket. It’s not if we’re going to do anything against Iran. They’re doing it.” The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran’s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. “Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement,” the consultant told me. “The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse” —like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said. “The idea that an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would produce a popular uprising is extremely illinformed,” said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration. “You have to understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that’s technologically sophisticated.” Leverett, who is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place, “will produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying around the regime.” Rumsfeld planned and lobbied for more than two years before getting Presidential authority, in a series of findings and executive orders, to use military commandos for covert operations. One of his first steps was bureaucratic: to shift control of an undercover unit, known then as the Gray Fox (it has recently been given a new code name), from the Army to the Special Operations Command (socom), in Tampa. Gray Fox was formally assigned to socom in July, 2002, at the instigation of Rumsfeld’s office, which meant that the undercover unit would have a single commander for administration and operational deployment. Then, last fall, Rumsfeld’s ability to deploy the commandos expanded. According to a Pentagon consultant, an Execute Order on the Global War on Terrorism (referred to throughout the government as gwot) was issued at Rumsfeld’s direction. The order specifically authorized the military “to find and finish” terrorist targets, the consultant said. It included a target list that cited Al Qaeda network members, Al Qaeda senior leadership, and other high-value targets. The consultant said that the order had been cleared throughout the national-security bureaucracy in Washington. In late November, 2004, the Times reported that Bush had set up an interagency group to study whether it “would best serve the nation” to give the Pentagon complete control over the C.I.A.’s own élite paramilitary unit, which has operated covertly in trouble spots around the world for decades. The panel’s conclusions, due in February, are foregone, in the view of many former C.I.A. officers. “It seems like it’s going to happen,” Howard Hart, who was chief of the C.I.A.’s Paramilitary Operations Division before retiring in 1991, told me. There was other evidence of Pentagon encroachment. Two former C.I.A. clandestine officers, Vince Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi, who publish Intelligence Brief, a newsletter for their business clients, reported last month on the existence of a broad counter-terrorism Presidential finding that permitted the Pentagon “to operate unilaterally in a number of countries where there is a perception of a clear and evident terrorist threat. . . . A number of the countries are friendly to the U.S. and are major trading partners. Most have been cooperating in the war on terrorism.” The two former officers listed some of the countries—Algeria, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and Malaysia. (I was subsequently told by the former high-level intelligence official that Tunisia is also on the list.) Giraldi, who served three years in military intelligence before joining the C.I.A., said that he was troubled by the military’s expanded covert assignment. “I don’t think they can handle the cover,” he told me. “They’ve got to have a different mind-set. They’ve got to handle new roles and get into foreign cultures and learn how other people think. If you’re going into a village and shooting people, it doesn’t matter,” Giraldi added. “But if you’re running operations that involve finesse and sensitivity, the military can’t do it. Which is why these kind of operations were always run out of the agency.” I was told that many Special Operations officers also have serious misgivings. Rumsfeld and two of his key deputies, Stephen Cambone, the Under-secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, will be part of the chain of command for the new commando operations. Relevant members of the House and Senate intelligence committees have been briefed on the Defense Department’s expanded role in covert affairs, a Pentagon adviser assured me, but he did not know how extensive the briefings had been. “I’m conflicted about the idea of operating without congressional oversight,” the Pentagon adviser said. “But I’ve been told that there will be oversight down to the specific operation.” A second Pentagon adviser agreed, with a significant caveat. “There are reporting requirements,” he said. “But to execute the finding we don’t have to go back and say, ‘We’re going here and there.’ No nitty-gritty detail and no micromanagement.” The legal questions about the Pentagon’s right to conduct covert operations without informing Congress have not been resolved. “It’s a very, very gray area,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a West Point graduate who served as the C.I.A.’s general counsel in the mid-nineteen-nineties. “Congress believes it voted to include all such covert activities carried out by the armed forces. The military says, ‘No, the things we’re doing are not intelligence actions under the statute but necessary military steps authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to “prepare the battlefield.” ’ ” Referring to his days at the C.I.A., Smith added, “We were always careful not to use the armed forces in a covert action without a Presidential finding. The Bush Administration has taken a much more aggressive stance.” In his conversation with me, Smith emphasized that he was unaware of the military’s current plans for expanding covert action. But he said, “Congress has always worried that the Pentagon is going to get us involved in some military misadventure that nobody knows about.” Under Rumsfeld’s new approach, I was told, U.S. military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists. This could potentially involve organizing and carrying out combat operations, or even terrorist activities. Some operations will likely take place in nations in which there is an American diplomatic mission, with an Ambassador and a C.I.A. station chief, the Pentagon consultant said. The Ambassador and the station chief would not necessarily have a need to know, under the Pentagon’s current interpretation of its reporting requirement. The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls “action teams” in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. “Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. “We founded them and we financed them,” he said. “The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.” A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, “We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.” One of the rationales for such tactics was spelled out in a series of articles by John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, and a consultant on terrorism for the rand corporation. “It takes a network to fight a network,” Arquilla wrote in a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle: When conventional military operations and bombing failed to defeat the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s, the British formed teams of friendly Kikuyu tribesmen who went about pretending to be terrorists. These “pseudo gangs,” as they were called, swiftly threw the Mau Mau on the defensive, either by befriending and then ambushing bands of fighters or by guiding bombers to the terrorists’ camps. What worked in Kenya a half-century ago has a wonderful chance of undermining trust and recruitment among today’s terror networks. Forming new pseudo gangs should not be difficult. “If a confused young man from Marin County can join up with Al Qaeda,” Arquilla wrote, referring to John Walker Lindh, the twenty-year-old Californian who was seized in Afghanistan, “think what professional operatives might do.” A few pilot covert operations were conducted last year, one Pentagon adviser told me, and a terrorist cell in Algeria was “rolled up” with American help. The adviser was referring, apparently, to the capture of Ammari Saifi, known as Abderrezak le Para, the head of a North African terrorist network affiliated with Al Qaeda. But at the end of the year there was no agreement within the Defense Department about the rules of engagement. “The issue is approval for the final authority,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “Who gets to say ‘Get this’ or ‘Do this’?” A retired four-star general said, “The basic concept has always been solid, but how do you insure that the people doing it operate within the concept of the law? This is pushing the edge of the envelope.” The general added, “It’s the oversight. And you’re not going to get Warner”—John Warner, of Virginia, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee—“and those guys to exercise oversight. This whole thing goes to the Fourth Deck.” He was referring to the floor in the Pentagon where Rumsfeld and Cambone have their offices. “It’s a finesse to give power to Rumsfeld—giving him the right to act swiftly, decisively, and lethally,” the first Pentagon adviser told me. “It’s a global free-fire zone.” The Pentagon has tried to work around the limits on covert activities before. In the early nineteen-eighties, a covert Army unit was set up and authorized to operate overseas with minimal oversight. The results were disastrous. The Special Operations program was initially known as Intelligence Support Activity, or I.S.A., and was administered from a base near Washington (as was, later, Gray Fox). It was established soon after the failed rescue, in April, 1980, of the American hostages in Iran, who were being held by revolutionary students after the Islamic overthrow of the Shah’s regime. At first, the unit was kept secret from many of the senior generals and civilian leaders in the Pentagon, as well as from many members of Congress. It was eventually deployed in the Reagan Administration’s war against the Sandinista government, in Nicaragua. It was heavily committed to supporting the Contras. By the mid-eighties, however, the I.S.A.’s operations had been curtailed, and several of its senior officers were courtmartialled following a series of financial scandals, some involving arms deals. The affair was known as “the Yellow Fruit scandal,” after the code name given to one of the I.S.A.’s cover organizations—and in many ways the group’s procedures laid the groundwork for the Iran-Contra scandal. Despite the controversy surrounding Yellow Fruit, the I.S.A. was kept intact as an undercover unit by the Army. “But we put so many restrictions on it,” the second Pentagon adviser said. “In I.S.A., if you wanted to travel fifty miles you had to get a special order. And there were certain areas, such as Lebanon, where they could not go.” The adviser acknowledged that the current operations are similar to those two decades earlier, with similar risks—and, as he saw it, similar reasons for taking the risks. “What drove them then, in terms of Yellow Fruit, was that they had no intelligence on Iran,” the adviser told me. “They had no knowledge of Tehran and no people on the ground who could prepare the battle space.” Rumsfeld’s decision to revive this approach stemmed, once again, from a failure of intelligence in the Middle East, the adviser said. The Administration believed that the C.I.A. was unable, or unwilling, to provide the military with the information it needed to effectively challenge stateless terrorism. “One of the big challenges was that we didn’t have Humint”—human intelligence—“collection capabilities in areas where terrorists existed,” the adviser told me. “Because the C.I.A. claimed to have such a hold on Humint, the way to get around them, rather than take them on, was to claim that the agency didn’t do Humint to support Special Forces operations overseas. The C.I.A. fought it.” Referring to Rumsfeld’s new authority for covert operations, the first Pentagon adviser told me, “It’s not empowering military intelligence. It’s emasculating the C.I.A.” A former senior C.I.A. officer depicted the agency’s eclipse as predictable. “For years, the agency bent over backward to integrate and coördinate with the Pentagon,” the former officer said. “We just caved and caved and got what we deserved. It is a fact of life today that the Pentagon is a five-hundred-pound gorilla and the C.I.A. director is a chimpanzee.” There was pressure from the White House, too. A former C.I.A. clandestine-services officer told me that, in the months after the resignation of the agency’s director George Tenet, in June, 2004, the White House began “coming down critically” on analysts in the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Intelligence (D.I.) and demanded “to see more support for the Administration’s political position.” Porter Goss, Tenet’s successor, engaged in what the recently retired C.I.A. official described as a “political purge” in the D.I. Among the targets were a few senior analysts who were known to write dissenting papers that had been forwarded to the White House. The recently retired C.I.A. official said, “The White House carefully reviewed the political analyses of the D.I. so they could sort out the apostates from the true believers.” Some senior analysts in the D.I. have turned in their resignations—quietly, and without revealing the extent of the disarray. The White House solidified its control over intelligence last month, when it forced last-minute changes in the intelligence-reform bill. The legislation, based substantially on recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, originally gave broad powers, including authority over intelligence spending, to a new national-intelligence director. (The Pentagon controls roughly eighty per cent of the intelligence budget.) A reform bill passed in the Senate by a vote of 96-2. Before the House voted, however, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld balked. The White House publicly supported the legislation, but House Speaker Dennis Hastert refused to bring a House version of the bill to the floor for a vote—ostensibly in defiance of the President, though it was widely understood in Congress that Hastert had been delegated to stall the bill. After intense White House and Pentagon lobbying, the legislation was rewritten. The bill that Congress approved sharply reduced the new director’s power, in the name of permitting the Secretary of Defense to maintain his “statutory responsibilities.” Fred Kaplan, in the online magazine Slate, described the real issues behind Hastert’s action, quoting a congressional aide who expressed amazement as White House lobbyists bashed the Senate bill and came up “with all sorts of ludicrous reasons why it was unacceptable.” “Rummy’s plan was to get a compromise in the bill in which the Pentagon keeps its marbles and the C.I.A. loses theirs,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Then all the pieces of the puzzle fall in place. He gets authority for covert action that is not attributable, the ability to directly task national-intelligence assets”—including the many intelligence satellites that constantly orbit the world. “Rumsfeld will no longer have to refer anything through the government’s intelligence wringer,” the former official went on. “The intelligence system was designed to put competing agencies in competition. What’s missing will be the dynamic tension that insures everyone’s priorities—in the C.I.A., the D.O.D., the F.B.I., and even the Department of Homeland Security—are discussed. The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what he’s doing so they can ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ or ‘What are your priorities?’ Now he can keep all of the mattress mice out of it.” From .... THE COMING WARS by SEYMOUR M. HERSH What the Pentagon can now do in secret. Issue of 2005-01-24 and 31 Posted 2005-01-17 Update .... CNN) -- A book written by a top CIA counterterrorism official alleges that the Bush administration has bungled the war on terror, and because of poor decisions the United States faces a choice in Iraq and Afghanistan "between war and endless war." Written by a high-level counterterrorism expert and published under the name "Anonymous," the book "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror" is unique in that it was written by an official still working for the CIA. And with the book slated to be released next week, the author has already appeared -- in shadow -- on a Sunday political talk show to defend his work. On ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopolous," the author accused some senior officials in the U.S. intelligence community of "a great deal of moral or bureaucratic cowardice" in dealing with the war on terror. Although he was relatively muted on the topic of George Tenet, the outgoing director of the CIA, the author was unsparing in his criticism of the Bush administration's decision to wait a month after the September 11, 2001, attacks before going to war in Afghanistan. "We were facing a government, the Taliban, which was basically a rural insurgency trying to govern cities, and al Qaeda, which is a 20-year-old insurgency. If you were going to hit them, sir, you had to hit them on the 11th or the 12th or the 13th." "By the time the 7th of October rolled along, most of those forces had been dispersed into the countryside, into Pakistan, into Iran, overseas to other countries. There was no 'there' left when we went there," he said. In his book, the author labeled the invasion of Iraq a "Christmas gift" to Osama bin Laden and said the country has become a "Mujahadeen magnet" attracting Muslims from around the world to fight the occupying U.S. forces. In an interview on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer," Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to comment on the author, but said that while there is an insurgency in Iraq, "I think what we are also seeing is that the world is coming together" and developing an "understanding that we have to deal with these kinds of terrorist organizations and not just write it all off to Muslim extremism." Also appearing on "This Week," national security advisor Condoleezza Rice refused to comment specifically on "Anonymous" because, "I don't know who Anonymous is." However Rice offered a defense of Bush administration policies in the war on terror and in Iraq. "What I can say is that a free Iraq, an Iraq in which these killers realize that we're moving toward a democratic future for Iraq which can be the linchpin for a different kind of Middle East, is going to frustrate, not improve, their plans." The book charges that Saddam Hussein posed no immediate threat to the United States; that the war in Iraq undermined the overall war against terror and actually played into bin Laden's hands; and that the United States is losing that war on terror. The author also predicts al Qaeda will again attack the continental United States and that it will be even more damaging than the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. The author says the biggest mistake made after 9/11 was that top intelligence community leaders were not fired. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida, who serves on the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, agreed. "As we try to prepare ourselves in this new era of terrorism, we have to just assume that we're going to have an attack," Nelson said. "And the only way that we prevent it is to have accurate and timely intelligence." Read more ... *CIA insider slams Bush antiterror policies Video ... *Covert Operations in Iran For Possible Military Strike References .... *Documents Concerning the CIA *Torture Photos, Videos a Time-Honored CIA Traditions Resources ... *CIA Covert Operations from 1947 to the Present *CIA Terror Archive *A History of CIA Atrocities *Covert Operations Dossier Paper Trail *CIA COVERT ACTIONS & DRUG TRAFFICKING *CIA’s Covert Afghan War Special Note: Even Lee Harvey Oswald (JFK assassination) worked for the CIA see this link: *Confidential CIA Memo