| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Jul 22, 2004 10:54 am Post subject: James Bamford on MSNBC 'Hardball about 'A Pretext for War' |
| http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5443572
Coming up: the reasons for war. A British report find its pre-war intelligence on Iraq‘s weapons of mass destruction relied in part on seriously flawed sources. James Bamford will be here.
You‘re watching HARDBALL on MSNBC.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL. On a day when insurgents gunned down an Iraqi governor and a car bomb killed at least 10 people in Baghdad, another report finds that Iraq had no significant stocks of chemical or biological weapons before the war. A just-released British report concludes that British intelligence on Iraq‘s weapons of mass destruction program was flawed, but it absolved the British government of deliberate distortion and culpable negligence. Despite this, Prime Minister Tony Blair took personal responsibility for the flawed intelligence.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TONY BLAIR, BRITISH PRIME MINISTER: I have to accept, as the months have passed, it seems increasingly clear that at the time of invasion, Saddam did not have stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons ready to deploy.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MATTHEWS: So why did both American and British intelligence get it wrong on Iraq? James Bamford is author of the book “A Pretext for War:
9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America‘s Intelligence Agencies”
James, let me ask you the question why both we and the British got it wrong in the same way? We thought he had lots of weapons of mass destruction.
JAMES BAMFORD, AUTHOR, “A PRETEXT FOR WAR”: Again, I think both the reasons are the same for both of them. They both wanted the war. They pushed the war as hard as they could. They pushed every excuse they could for having this war. And the intelligence community pretty much on both—both in Britain and the United States, went along. One of the people I interviewed at CIA said the supervisor of one of the units looking for the weapons of mass destruction called all his group together and said, Look, if the president wants a war, it‘s your job to give him a reason to go to war. And I think that‘s the kind of pressure there was.
MATTHEWS: Who said that?
BAMFORD: It was supervisor of one of the units looking for weapons of mass destruction at the CIA.
MATTHEWS: Well, I‘ve been thinking about this for the last day or so, flying on a plane from California. And my simple question was, was that it we were taken in by flawed intelligence or that we were so determined to go to war, we‘re willing to take risky and uncertain intelligence to justify it?
BAMFORD: Well, it was both. And the ironic thing was at the time we went to war, we had more intelligence agents on the ground in Iraq than anywhere else in the world. We had all those inspectors, and they were going everywhere. We were having U-2 planes flying overhead. We had all the list of places that had suspected weapons, and rather than having the inspectors go there and look for them, the Bush administration pulled them out. And we went to war, and now we‘re paying the price.
MATTHEWS: Tony Blair was pretty dramatic in selling the war to his own people—and to us, because we always like Tony Blair. Americans like the Brits, usually, generally. He said there was biological weapon could have hit Britain in 45 minutes.
BAMFORD: That was an outrageous claim.
MATTHEWS: Where‘d he get such a specific time?
BAMFORD: Well, there was a report that he read from one of the intelligence organizations. But again, like in the United States, they didn‘t put the caveats in there.
MATTHEWS: Like, did they have the weapons? How‘s that for a caveat?
BAMFORD: They didn‘t—if they had the weapons, if they were available, if they were ready to be fired, they could have done that. But the problem was, they didn‘t have the weapons, they weren‘t ready and they weren‘t ready to fire. So no, it couldn‘t have happened in 45 minutes.
MATTHEWS: I‘m wondering whether all this intel, the bad intel that went to the British government, Tony Blair, and to our president, all came from the same garbage dump of bad intel. According to the British report today, some of this bad intel they had was received from another government‘s intelligence agency, and it was seriously flawed. Could it be we‘re all dipping out of the same bad well when it comes to info? Like the INC, the Iraqi National Congress, other people supporting the war?
BAMFORD: Exactly. In Israel, there were two commissions that came out, and both of them concluded that Israel didn‘t have any good intelligence. And they were passing that on to the United States. We got bad intelligence from the Italian intelligence service on Niger that led to the suspicion that Saddam was buying nuclear material from West Africa. So there was a lot of bad intelligence floating around.
MATTHEWS: Were we? Was that true?
BAMFORD: No. They found there was no evidence that he was buying...
MATTHEWS: So no ability to hit us in 45 minutes, no uranium bought in Africa, no mobile biological weapons, no nuclear program. I mean...
BAMFORD: No connections to al Qaeda.
MATTHEWS: No connections to—it seems like they batted zero, in baseball terminology, a zero.
BAMFORD: A zero, and people are paying with their lives now for that
· that bad move, where they could have left the inspectors in there and nobody would have been killed, at this point.
MATTHEWS: A couple questions, lingering questions here. And you‘re the expert with your book, “A Pretext for War,” James. Let me ask you this. Why did the British still hang onto that Niger notion, that uranium was going to be bought by the Iraqi government in Niger in Africa?
BAMFORD: Well, they‘re claiming that they have independent sources beyond the forged documents. And they‘ve never revealed those sources, and theoretically, they haven‘t told the CIA what those sources are, which seems incredible to me. So they‘re claiming they have this information, but they‘re not willing to give up the...
MATTHEWS: So they won‘t die on that one.
BAMFORD: ... the information...
MATTHEWS: They‘ll never give that one up.
BAMFORD: They aren‘t even giving it to the CIA.
MATTHEWS: So everybody basically agrees that there‘s no WAD there, except two people. They‘re still saying there‘s something to this uranium deal. And Dick Cheney says there‘s still a connection between al Qaeda and Iraq, and he suggested it‘s a prominent, important connection. It‘s not just they met once in a while, but they were connected in the operations, which would suggest they had something to do with 9/11, the Iraqi government.
BAMFORD: Well, I would suggest that he come—hold a press conference and tell the public because there are American that are dying every day on there on this phony intelligence. And if he has some real intelligence, he should tell people what it is instead of being very coy about it.
MATTHEWS: Why do you think he‘s doing it?
BAMFORD: Well, he has a base out there, and he‘s got to give the base something to go on. The base has very little, his political base—very little to go on, at this point, so he‘s got to give them something. So you hear on the Rush Limbaugh show or something that the vice president is saying that there still is a connection. And those people, if they hear their only news from the Rush Limbaugh show, they‘re going to believe it.
MATTHEWS: Were we facing any real threat from Iraq?
BAMFORD: No. Every report that‘s come out has said that we haven‘t been facing any threat from Iraq. Iraq had nothing to threaten us with.
MATTHEWS: Well, why did our people think so?
BAMFORD: Well...
MATTHEWS: Do you think they deluded themselves? Do you think Colin
Powell deluded himself? Do you think Rumsfeld deludes himself, Wolfowitz,
Feith, the whole gang? Do you think the administration sort of war cabinet
· do you believe all of them, including the president, said, We don‘t really believe this stuff, but we‘re going to force ourselves to believe it to sell this war?
BAMFORD: Well, I think they had planned this war long before the administration came to power. The neocons, particularly at the Pentagon, had dreamed up this plan in 1996 and were trying to give to it Israel, to Benjamin Netanyahu.
MATTHEWS: Yes, it‘s called the clean break...
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: Right. I know.
BAMFORD: They were working as consultants for him. And it never went anywhere. Netanyahu never did anything with it. And then September 11 came up, and all of a sudden, as one of the members of that group wrote, Crisis is our opportunity.
MATTHEWS: Was that Richard Perle?
BAMFORD: No, that was David Wurmser (ph), who...
MATTHEWS: Oh, Wurmser, Feith and Perle were all in on both, both trying to sell it to Netanyahu...
BAMFORD: That‘s right.
MATTHEWS: ... head of Likud at the time and head of the Israeli government, and also now head—trying to sell the same package of arguments to us.
BAMFORD: Well, they brought it with them, and they became...
MATTHEWS: Years later.
BAMFORD: ... high officials at the Pentagon, and they‘re the architects of the war.
MATTHEWS: I‘ve read all about it. Thank you for putting a lot of this in the book, James Bamford. The book‘s called “A Pretext for War:
9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America‘s Intelligence Agencies.”
Up next, Minnesota‘s traditionally—at least, it used to be a Democratic liberal state, but president Bush is hoping to steal it away from the Republicans this time—for the Republicans. We‘ll talk to Minnesota‘s governor, Tim Pawlenty.
You‘re watching HARDBALL on MSNBC.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MATTHEWS: This half-hour on HARDBALL, battleground | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Jul 22, 2004 11:00 am Post subject: More on James Bamford's 'A Pretext for War' Book |
| Jason Vest for 'The Nation' publication:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020902&s=vest
Robert Fisk mentions the above referenced 'Men from JINSA and CSP'
article (in which Mr. Gaffney is mentioned as well) in the following
article from the London Independent:
http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles114.htm
JINSA/PNAC Zionist extremists (who were for the Iraq
invasion/occupation) are profiting from Iraq reconstruction as you can read in the Los Angeles Times article via the following URL:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/the-americas/2004/07/15/advocates-of-war-now-profit-from-iraq-s-reconstruction.php
James Bamford just appeared on MSNBC's 'Hardball' television program
in the USA last night as I would very much like for him to be
interviewed on the BBC as well about his excellent new book ('A Pretext for War'). Additional information about Mr. Bamford's new book ('A
Pretext for War') appears after the following two URLs:
'The Lie Factory' article:
http://www.mojones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html
'The New Pentagon Papers':
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5829.htm
Here is the link for James Bamford's new book ('A Pretext for War'):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/06/14/iraq-war-for-israel-according-to-james-bamford-s-new-book.php
The following is a transcript of an interview with James Bamford:
SHOW: Fresh Air (12:00 Noon PM ET) - NPR
June 8, 2004 Tuesday
LENGTH: 5443 words
HEADLINE: James Bamford discusses his book, "A Pretext for War"
ANCHORS: TERRY GROSS
BODY:
TERRY GROSS, host:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.
My guest, James Bamford, is the author of the new book, "A Pretext for
War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies." He
writes about weaknesses in American intelligence before 9/11,
reconstructs how the military and the Bush administration responded on 9/11,
explores the motivations behind the invasion of Iraq and charges that
intelligence agencies were pressured to come up with findings that would
justify the invasion. Bamford has written extensively about national
security issues and is the author of two best-selling books about the highly
secretive National Security Agency, "The Puzzle Palace" and "Body of
Secrets."
The United States ha! s turned against Ahmad Chalabi, who was the head
of the Iraqi National Congress and who, at one time, was a likely
leader of the new Iraq. What is some of the information that we got from him
that turned out to be false?
Prof. JAMES BAMFORD (Author, "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the
Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies"): Well, Chalabi supplied a
number of defectors to the United States that provided false information.
Some of the information came from defectors that indicated that the
Iraqis had these bioweapons labs, which raised a lot of concern at the time
and a lot of media coverage but turned out to be false. The few
vehicles they did find ended up not being for biological warfare but for, I
think, developing helium for balloons of some sort, weather balloons or
launching systems or something. But they certainly didn't have to do
with biological weapons labs. So that was part of the problem.
A lot of the information that came from the people he supplie! d was
false. And a number of people suspect that the key reason Chalabi kept
pushing these people on the US and also on the press--but I think one of
the primary motives behind Ahmad Chalabi was to get himself put in as
the president of Iraq. He had been wanting that for years and years and
years. And as I write in my book, he had known many of the
neoconservatives in the Bush administration for more than a decade and had become
very good friends with them. And they were very much supporting his
taking over Iraq. And then they would have had their own puppet in there.
GROSS: Some of the money that actually helped support Chalabi went
through a group called the Rendon Group, which was backed by the CIA. What
was the Rendon Group?
Prof. BAMFORD: Well, the Rendon Group is one of these sort of shadowy,
private companies that do a lot of clandestine work for the CIA and
other parts of the government. And the Rendon Group specializes in
disinformation campaigns; it ran ! an anti-Saddam disinformation campaign for
a number of years. And it's been used by the United States in many
conflicts to broadcast the US message and to help eliminate the message of
whoever the United States is opposing. So its background is basically
used by the government in a lot of sort of clandestine
information-operations activities.
GROSS: So, in this case, the Rendon Group was hired to turn world
opinion against Saddam Hussein?
Prof. BAMFORD: That's right, yeah. This was after the Gulf War. And
the CIA put a fair amount of money into it, and they really wanted to
change the view of the world towards Saddam Hussein.
GROSS: So with the help of the CIA, Chalabi became a real force in
terms of, you know, informing or misinforming people about what was
happening in Iraq and a real force in terms of being groomed as a future
leader of Iraq. But at some point the CIA started to turn against him. Why?
Prof. BAMFORD: Well, the CIA started havi! ng problems with both
accountability of money and, also, the information he was providing. And it
didn't look like he was in control of as much people and groups as he
claimed he was, so the CIA turned away from him in the mid-1990s.
Largely it was over issues of credibility, money and information.
GROSS: And you say that eventually he got support from a group of
neoconservatives, including three people who became national security
advisers to President George W. Bush: Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David
Wurmser. They drew up a plan that, you say, became a blueprint for the
war in Iraq. The plan was actually drawn up for Israel and for then
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; he had hired them as
consultants. What was the plan that they came up with for him?
Prof. BAMFORD: Well, the plan actually that they came up for Israel,
for Netanyahu, to implement was very similar to what the plan was that
we ended up implementing as we went into war with Iraq. ! And that was
to overthrow Saddam Hussein and replace him with somebody friendly to
both the United States and Israel. Part of the original plan, the one
that they had proposed for Israel, involved not just Iraq but also
invading Syria and Lebanon. And one of the reasons that they wanted to give
for doing that was, basically, a pretext to get the US on board and to
get the US public support. And they were going to announce that part of
the reason that they were doing this was to try to eradicate the drug
dealing that's going on in Lebanon and, also, to look for weapons of mass
destruction. And another reason was to eliminate counterfeiting of US
money that was going on there. So there was a number of pretexts that
they were going to use to justify their invasion of Syria and Lebanon.
GROSS: Netanyahu rejected this plan. Do you know why?
Prof. BAMFORD: Well, I don't think he thought it was in Israel's
interest to go to war with three of its neighbors at that point. It ! was a
very--it would have been an extremely adventurous move for the Israeli
government to launch a war on a number of its fronts, especially
without any real provocation. None of these countries were invading Israel.
And I think Netanyahu felt he had enough on his plate without declaring
a Middle East war.
GROSS: Now how do you think that report figures into the American
invasion of Iraq?
Prof. BAMFORD: Well, the way it figures in is that the key people
behind this initial report back in 1996, which was called "A Clean
Break"--that was their title for it--were three of the key players who ended up
implementing this war in Iraq that we're having right now. And that was
Richard Perle, who became head of the Defense Policy Board, which is a
very major player in declaring policy for the US government in terms of
the Department of Defense, and Douglas Feith, who now is the
number-three man in the Pentagon, basically, the undersecretary of Defense for
policy. And his j! ob is creating policy; he's responsible for much of
the war planning and the post-war planning. And the third person is David
Wurmser, who was originally with the State Department and now is Vice
President Cheney's Middle East adviser.
So these three players played a major role in the run-up to the war in
Iraq after the September 11th attacks. And they were the same three
major players who were the key people behind this "Clean Break" report,
which was the original report to Israel suggesting that the Israeli
government launch this war against Iraq and several of its other neighbors.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is James Bamford. He's
written extensively about intelligence in America and particularly about
the National Security Agency. His new book is called "A Pretext for War:
9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies."
Now we've been talking about Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and David
Wurmser, three national security advi! sers to President George W. Bush,
and their role in advocating war in Iraq. What was their connection to
Ahmad Chalabi?
Prof. BAMFORD: Well, actually, Terry, the connection between these
people and Ahmad Chalabi goes back a long ways. Chalabi had known Richard
Perle and the deputy Defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, for a long,
long time, more than 10 years, maybe up to 15 years. They got to know each
other through a mutual fund, Albert Wohlstetter, who was a professor at
the University of Chicago. And he introduced several of these people
together. Chalabi had actually been a student of Wohlstetter, and
Wohlstetter knew both Perle and Wolfowitz very well. So they all got to know
each other in the late '80s, and from then on they thought that Chalabi
was an ideal candidate to take over Iraq. For a long time Chalabi had
been groomed, basically, to be the next president of Iraq, as soon as
they were able to get rid of Saddam Hussein.
GROSS: Now what were some of the disagreements between the
neoconservatives, who you've been describing, and the CIA about Chalabi and what
his role should be in Iraq?
Prof. BAMFORD: Well, I think the major disagreements were that the CIA
felt that Chalabi wasn't trustworthy; that he didn't really control
very many people; that he didn't have very much support within Iraq. He'd
left Iraq when he was 12 years old and hadn't really been back there
since. And the CIA had a lot of other things on its agenda. It was
looking for other ways to have a coup in Iraq. It wanted, basically, a coup
among generals to take over the country from Saddam Hussein and not have
this uprising led by Ahmad Chalabi. And that was the main difference.
The neocons, led by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, pretty much, were
pushing to have Chalabi lead this massive insurrection.
But the CIA looked at it largely like what happened on the Bay of
Pigs, where originally the Eisenhower administration, later the Kennedy
administration, came up with this plan to put a small group of rebels in
the country that would inspire this much larger revolution and overthrow
Castro. And it turned out to be an enormous debacle, and I think that's
one of the things that they were afraid of with Chalabi.
GROSS: My guest is James Bamford, author of the new book "A Pretext
for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies."
We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is James Bamford. And he's
written extensively about intelligence in the United States, including
the National Security Agency. His new book is called "A Pretext for
War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies."
You write a lot about how information was cherry-picked to make the
case for war. I mean, your title of the book is "A Pretext for War." You
write how one CIA officer, who was one of your sources! , said
that--and he was, by the way, in a unit charged with finding weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq. He said that his boss said, 'If President Bush wants
to go to war, it's your job to give him a reason to do so.' Can you
tell us about what he described to you about this?
Prof. BAMFORD: Yes. This person was a former case officer. The person
went through the farm, the training school. And this person, this case
officer, was outraged. And there was no evidence of weapons of mass
destruction. I interviewed a lot of people at the CIA, and not one of them
came up with any hard information saying that there was any indications
of weapons of mass destruction before we went to war. And there was a
tremendous amount of pressure, on the other hand, from the vice
president's office, from Cheney's office, to come up with something. He went
through the CIA a number of times, and according to one of the people at
CIA I interviewed, the implication was that they were supposed to find
something and preferably something nuclear. So there was a lot of
pressure from outside the agency on the agency to come up with something to
justify the war.
GROSS: Do you think it would have been appropriate for, say, George
Tenet to protect his men from that kind of pressure to find something
that didn't seem to be there? You could also argue that it was right to
press them to find this because it might have been there, and it was
their job to find it if there was any chance that it existed, you know. So
that pressure would be pressuring them to find that needle in the
haystack, even if it was only a needle.
Prof. BAMFORD: Well, there's automatically a lot of pressure on them
to find something. The problem comes when you push somebody to justify a
war by finding something that isn't there, and I think that's the
problem that we had. George Tenet, at the very beginning, seemed to stand up
against the administration at the early stages during the summer and!
fall of 2002. There was a point where the administration was trying to
push the issue of Saddam doing a deal with people in Niger, a West
African country, for uranium in order to build up a nuclear weapons supply
in Iraq. And at first George Tenet fought against that. He argued that
the president should have that reference to the Niger nuclear deal taken
out of his public, nationwide address in Cincinnati in October of 2002.
So that took a lot of gumption, basically, to stand up against the
White House and say--basically, demand that it be taken out of his speech.
But then after that it seemed like George Tenet pretty much gave up
and sort of threw up his hands and said, 'I'm not going to fight this
anymore.' I mean, that was the impression I got because he never again
took a strong stance on something like that. And you could see it just a
few months later during the president's State of the Union address,
where that same reference was put back in. And this time George Ten! et not
only didn't fight against it; he didn't even bother reading the
president's State of the Union address, which is rather extraordinary
considering that we're about to go to war based on what the president is saying
during his State of the Union address and the director of Central
Intelligence doesn't even bother to read the address.
So it seemed to me that at some point there around October of 2002,
George Tenet, after his sort of battle with the White House over taking
out the Niger material from the Cincinnati speech, kind of threw up his
hands and said, 'OK, you win. I give up,' and from then on became a
team player with the White House and the hard-core neoconservatives.
GROSS: Do you have any inside information from your sources about the
American secrets that Ahmad Chalabi is alleged to have given to Iran?
You know, we've been reading in the newspapers that he's alleged to have
told Iran that the United States had broken its code and that,
therefore, we! were able to interpret certain Iranian intelligence secrets;
that means Iran would now change its code, and we'd no longer have access
to that source of information.
Prof. BAMFORD: Well, I do know that the National Security Agency spent
many, many years trying to break the Iranian code. It was a very, very
difficult cipher system to break. And code-breaking these days is a
very, very difficult occupation, having written two books on the National
Security Agency. The problem is that the crypto systems these days are
extremely complex and very hard. The basic way that the NSA had to
break that code, the Iranian cipher, was by using people to penetrate the
organization. The Iranian Embassy in Baghdad--that's where it was
penetrated. And they used people, basically code clerks, to get in there and
do things to the crypto system to make it usable for NSA.
One of the things that's done these days is to try to bug a keyboard.
If you could bug the keyboard, then you're b! ugging the system before
the information actually gets encrypted. Or else bug the monitor, or
you could bug a power cord. You could do various things that way. And
apparently that was one of the things that they had done, one of those
ways of tapping into the Iranian communications system.
So the loss of that information, which allegedly Ahmad Chalabi gave to
the Iranian government, was tremendously detrimental to the United
States because whether the NSA will be able to redo that again is almost
impossible to say. The NSA tries very hard breaking these codes, and if
somebody gives that code away, then it could be years or decades or
never before they're ever able to break that code again. And if you
remember World War II, the biggest success that we had during World War II in
terms of intelligence was breaking the German Enigma code. So those
things are very frail. And if somebody like Chalabi, if he's allegedly
accused of doing, gave the information that the US had broke! n that
encryption system to the Iranian government, then the US could be without
any intelligence on Iran for many years.
GROSS: Do you think that Chalabi is now out of the game in Iraq, or is
he trying to reinvent himself now that he no longer has American
backing?
Prof. BAMFORD: Well, Chalabi, if anything, he's certainly a survivor.
He's been surviving for years and years and years in northern Iran and
living in London and making deals with these neoconservatives. So he's
a dealmaker and a survivor. And I think right now he's trying to sort
of capitalize on the fact that the US is dissing him at this point by
saying, 'Look, I'm not one of these US stooges, and I can be trusted.'
And he's trying to capitalize on that and use it to his advantage to
become one of the elected, if not the elected, president of Iraq when these
elections are due sometime before next January.
GROSS: That would be the ultimate paradox, wouldn't it, if he became
the president of th! e new Iraq based on his self-description of not
being an American stooge, of being in opposition to America?
Prof. BAMFORD: And I'm sure there'll be a lot of people thinking
conspiracy theories; that this has been sort of a Machiavellian way of
planning the whole thing all along. He was getting nowhere because he was
looked at as an Iraqi stooge, and all of a sudden he's completely
disgraced in the United States and then he succeeds in becoming president.
And, you know, to think that that was part of the plot would be very
Machiavellian, right? So it's a little beyond my comprehension at this time,
but stranger things have happened.
GROSS: James Bamford is the author of "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq
and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies." He's a distinguished
visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He'll
be back in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is
FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
(Announce! ments)
(Soundbite of music)
GROSS: Coming up, Lloyd Schwartz considers the music from the 1956
film "Around the World in 80 Days," which is now out on DVD. And we
continue our conversation with James Bamford, author of "A Pretext for War."
(Soundbite of music)
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with James Bamford,
author of the new book "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of
America's Intelligence Agencies." He's written extensively about national
security issues, including two best-selling books about the National
Security Agency, "The Puzzle Palace" and "Body of Secrets."
Let's talk a little bit about September 11th. You write in your book
about some of the things that happened within American intelligence on
that day. Let's start with the fact that two flight attendants on one of
the planes had managed to call I guess it was the FAA and tell them
what seats were empty. And that gave a lot of information about who the
passengers were, who were actually the hostage-takers, who were actually
hijacking the plane. What information did they give, and how could the
intelligence agencies have used that to figure out who was responsible
for what was going on?
Mr. BAMFORD: Well, these flight attendants were extremely courageous.
And they were speaking from a phone back in the rear section of the
plane, and one of them contacted a ground person in American Airlines back
in Boston and another contacted a different person. And they were both
talking to different people giving an idea of what was going on on the
plane. And it was extremely useful for the intelligence community
because they gave the seat numbers, and the US pretty much immediately got
the manifest. So they were able to tell very quickly who some of these
people were after the event by getting the numbers of the seats where
these passengers, the people who were hijacking the plane, were sitting.
In addition to that, the! flight attendants were able to give a great
deal of information about how the hijacking took place. Apparently, the
hijackers, when they first came on the plane, they had a--among the
things they had hidden were these boxes with wires hanging out of them. So
apparently in addition to having knives, they had a phony bomb,
something that looked like a bomb, that they could threaten the crew or the
pilot and the co-pilot with. Also, when they went up to the very front
part of the plane, they threw everybody out of the first-class section,
and then they sprayed that area with something like--some kind of
chemical that forced everybody out and made sure nobody would come back into
that section, at least for a while.
So the flight attendants were able to give that information, which was
very valuable. And they were talking to the ground people right up
until the moment the plane hit. And as the plane was getting nearer--well,
actually, as it was flying low over New York City, th! ey were saying,
'The plane is flying very low. We're over New York City.' And they
described the direction of the plane, and then everything went quiet as the
plane just hit the building.
GROSS: What was the military response as the planes were flying toward
their targets?
Mr. BAMFORD: Well, the US was not prepared for this at all. The US at
that point was defended by seven--or actually, 14 aircraft at seven
different air bases, seven air bases that had two fighter planes each. And
all the NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command, the group that's
supposed to look for early warning, was looking outward; they were
looking outside the United States at something coming in. So they didn't
even have the equipment to look at what was taking place in real time
within the United States. So the US posture at that moment was extremely
advantageous to the hijackers. And right after the hijacking, the US
went into an enormously chaotic period.
GROSS: Well, let's ge! t to where President Bush was. He was in the
classroom reading to children there. In your book you're very critical of
President Bush during the time that he's in the classroom reading to
students there on September 11th, and you think that there's things he
could have done. You criticize him for being slow to react.
Mr. BAMFORD: Yes. One of the things that's interesting is that he's
told a number of audiences--and I think it was on his Web site at one
point; it might still be there--his version of how he learned about the
attack that morning. And he says that prior to going into the class, he
was brought into sort of an anteroom to be told about the first plane
hitting. And he saw the plane hitting the World Trade Center on the TV
monitor in the room. The problem is that couldn't possibly be true
because the video of that first plane hitting the World Trade Center wasn't
available until at least that night, if not the next morning. There was
no video of the first plane ! hitting the World Trade Center, so he
couldn't have seen that. And it's curious as to why he continually says
that. So if he actually saw a plane hit the World Trade Center on the
monitor, it had to have been the second plane that hit, in which case he
would have known that two planes had hit the World Trade Center before
he actually went into the classroom.
What transpired after that was that he went into the classroom. He was
there for a few minutes. And then his chief of staff, Andrew Card, came
in and whispered in his ear that a second plane had hit the World Trade
Center and that the United States is under attack. And at that point,
video cameras were on President Bush, and he had this very perplexed
look on his face. What's ironic is that he says later that at that moment
he decided to declare war. Yet it was actually seven minutes that he
continued to sit there. He never once asked, 'What's the intelligence?
Where's the secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Jo! int Chiefs
of Staff? What's our readiness? What's NORAD know about all this?' He
never asked any of these questions. He just continued to sit there.
Now seven minutes is a long time, especially when you consider that
these planes are flying around; they're hitting the World Trade Center,
they're flying towards the Pentagon, they're flying towards the White
House or the Capitol. And it was amazing how little was done in
that--moments after the president was notified that the US is under terrorist
attack. And he says himself that, 'I decided to declare war.'
GROSS: My guest is James Bamford, author of the new book "A Pretext
for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies."
We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
GROSS: James Bamford is my guest, and he's written extensively about
US intelligence agencies, especially the National Security Agency. His
new book is called "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Ir! aq and the Abuse of
America's Intelligence Agencies."
There was a group established within the CIA called Alex Station. And
the sole job of this group was to learn about bin Laden. You say it's
the first time there was a group within the CIA devoted not to studying
a country but focusing on one person. What you're critical of is the
decision within this group not to try to penetrate al-Qaeda by sending
somebody undercover, and that was an intentional decision. What was that
decision based on?
Mr. BAMFORD: Well, the CIA had a long history of not using its own
people to penetrate terrorist groups. I thought it was not a very
far-sighted idea. It was based, basically, just on tradition. And if you look
back, J. Edgar Hoover, when he ran the FBI, had sort of a similar
philosophy. He never used FBI agents to--undercover operations to penetrate
the Mafia, for example. He never wanted FBI agents to take off their
white shirt and ties. And it wasn't till after he died that! the FBI began
actually penetrating the Mafia, a very dangerous job, and actually
having great successes at it.
And the NS--I'm sorry, the CIA, at this point, was in that same
situation where they had always wanted to depend on foreign services, what
they call liaison services--the Pakistani intelligence, for example, or
ex-mujaheddin--to collect intelligence for it without training its own
people to go in there. And the problem you have is when you're depending
on a group like the Pakistani intelligence service or a group of
ex-mujaheddin, which the CIA used in Afghanistan in the period leading up to
September 11th, they couldn't trust these people. They had a lot of
doubts about whether the information they were getting from them was true.
There was nobody there to supervise them. The Pakistani intelligence
had reasons to deceive the United States because they were involved in
setting up the Taliban government in the first place. And then the
ex-mujaheddin, who the CIA had! hired to try to find bin Laden, were just
these sort of ex-Afghan fighters who had experience fighting the Russians
about a decade earlier but had very little other training.
And so, ironically--and this is one of the biggest ironies of the
entire events leading up to September 11th--at the very time the CIA was
not even trying to penetrate al-Qaeda, eight Americans had already joined
al-Qaeda and were training at one of Osama bin Laden's bases in
Afghanistan. One of those was John Walker Lindh, but there are about seven
other native-born Americans who had also joined up. And in my book
"Pretext for War," I trace the whole events of John Walker Lindh and how he
got into Afghanistan and how he became a member of al-Qaeda. And it's
almost a blueprint of what the CIA should have done to try to get somebody
in there. He went to Yemen; he studied the Koran there. He learned
Arabic. Then he was sent to one of the religious schools in Pakistan and
became very familiar with the cult! ure over there and was liked by some
of the people at the religious school. And then they sent him on to a
training school for mujaheddin for guerrilla fighters that were fighting
against the Indian government in Kashmir. And after that he said he
didn't want to fight in Kashmir; he wanted to fight in Afghanistan.
So they gave him a letter of introduction. He went to Afghanistan, and
he went to the Taliban office in Kabul. And they said that his language
skills weren't quite good enough to join the Taliban to fight the
Northern Alliance, but that there was another group down the street that
might be good, because he spoke good Arabic, but he didn't speak very good
Pashtun or Dari. So they sent him down to al-Qaeda, which was down the
street. And he went down there, and he said he wanted to fight the
Northern Alliance. And I think it was about 40 minutes or whatever he was
only in there, and they said, 'Fine.' And they sent him to a little
halfway house, until they had enough! people after a day or two to put on a
bus. And they took them all to this bin Laden training camp. And while
he was there, he had a number of one-on-one meetings, as well as the
other Americans, with bin Laden himself and so forth.
So it's ironic that these people, without even trying, were able to
penetrate and actually get into the bin Laden training camps. And they
were never required to kill anybody. They never were killed if they said
they were going to leave. One person didn't like it and decided to
leave halfway through, and they said, 'Fine.' And they just went back to
the United States. So it's tragic and ironic at the same time that the
CIA never did the same type of clandestine activity that John Walker
Lindh did, which was learn Arabic, study the Koran, get acclimated to the
culture and attempt to penetrate al-Qaeda.
GROSS: You've devoted most of your career to studying American
intelligence agencies. You have a lot of sources inside intelligence agenci!
es. And I'm wondering what your confidence level is now in American
intelligence?
Mr. BAMFORD: Well, it's not very good because the intelligence, when I
was writing about my last two books, were written during periods that
we weren't really focused on terrorism as much. The first book I wrote,
"The Puzzle Palace," back in 1982, we were in the middle of the Cold
War. And the US was doing a very good job in terms of collecting
intelligence on the Russians and what was happening. But they had 50 years of
practice practically, and they had a target that wasn't moving anywhere.
And they knew pretty much that the only attack was going to come from
missiles, so we had satellites overhead that could watch these missiles
24 hours a day.
The period now, though, however, after September 11th with terrorism
being the top of the agenda, the intelligence community is not really
set up to do that kind of thing. They're not set up to follow people
around the world very easily. It's! very easy to hide if you really want to
hide these days. You can have cell phones that you could throw away
after several uses. You can have calling cards that don't give any
indication as to who the person is that's making the phone call. And there's
all sorts of ways that a person can really hide, as you can see from
Osama bin Laden and even Saddam Hussein, who we were after for a very,
very long time, and we occupied his country. He stayed hidden for many,
many months before the United States was able to locate him. So finding
terrorists is a very difficult prospect for the intelligence community,
and the prospects are not very good.
GROSS: James Bamford is the author of "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq
and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies."
I want to let you know that on Friday's show, we're going to remember
the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. He died of cancer Friday at the age
of 69. We'll listen back to a 1997 interview with Lacy. Here's what he!
sounded like. This is a 1996 recording of "Evidence," by Thelonious
Monk, the composer and musician who most influenced Lacy. Misha Mengelberg
is featured on piano.
(Soundbite of "Evidence")
GROSS: Coming up, Lloyd Schwartz listens to the music from the film,
"Around the World in 80 Days," which has been released on DVD. This is
FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
LOAD-DATE: June 9, 2004 | | | | Alpha | | | | dangerousdna | | Posted: Thu Jul 22, 2004 11:40 pm Post subject: |
| | Great show! | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jul 24, 2004 5:35 am Post subject: Democracy and the Washington Neocons - a marriage of conveni |
| Democracy and the Washington Neocons - a marriage of convenience
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2004 19:15:48 -0400 From: "David Chiang"
<chiang.d@worldnet.att.net>
Democracy and the neocons: a marriage of convenience
By Jim Lobe Wednesday, July 21, 2004
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?article_ID=6453&categ_ID=5&edition_id=10
Of all the delusions that American neoconservatives perpetrated in
their drive
to take the US to war in Iraq, the most durable was the notion that
they were
committed to the spread of Wilsonian democracy. As someone who has
watched the
neocon movement over the past 30 years or so, I find this hard to
accept.
My skepticism is based on several factors, including the obvious
selectivity
of the neocons. After all, one has only to look at their support for
authoritarian regimes in Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Tunisia and Jordan - as
opposed
to their eagerness to invade Iraq in the name of bringing democratic
rule
there - to find some glaring inconsistencies. At the same time, it is
the
neocons who pushed hardest for US President George W. Bush to cease
dealing
with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, though he was
elected by a
substantial majority of eligible voters in the West Bank and Gaza.
Indeed,
neocon hard-liners like former Pentagon official Richard Perle believe
Palestinians should be denied self-determination altogether.
Without doubt, neocons have long professed a devotion to democracy.
Indeed,
their main argument in favor of a US strategic alliance with Israel - a
central and persistent tenet of the neoconservative creed over the past
three
decades - has been the Jewish state's status as the lone democratic
outpost in
a region of seething and hate-filled Arab autocracies. The question,
however,
is whether democracy promotion, especially in the Arab world, ranks
anywhere
nearly as high in the neocons' policy priorities as their commitment to
Israeli security. And to the extent that they may perceive a potential
conflict between the two, which one are they inclined to choose as the
more important?
A brief look at the historical record may help provide an answer. While
the
neocon movement sprouted wings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as
Israel
found itself increasingly isolated at the UN, neoconservatives first
tasted
real power under former President Ronald Reagan, who was especially
taken with
Jeane Kirkpatrick's attacks on Jimmy Carter's human rights policies.
According
to her, these were disastrously undermining "friendly authoritarian"
regimes
in Iran, Nicaragua, South America, and even apartheid South Africa -
all
governments enjoying friendly relations with Israel. Instead of
hectoring such
regimes on reform, she argued, Washington should have provided them
with
unstinting support as allies in the global struggle against Soviet
communism,
both because Moscow was the far greater evil, and because authoritarian
regimes could become "democracies," while "totalitarian" ones could
not.
Reagan applied these ideas. During his first term, Washington not only
renewed
military and other forms of support to "friendly authoritarians," but
also
began the Reagan Doctrine - the sponsorship of right-wing "freedom
fighters,"
such as jihadists in Afghanistan, tribal nationalists in Angola and
ex-National Guard figures in Nicaragua, who distinguished themselves
more by
fanaticism and brutality than by the democratic arts. At the same time,
neocons were ecstatic with Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon - not
because it
furthered the cause of democracy, but because it meant the expulsion of
the
PLO from Lebanon and a shift in the regional balance of power against
Soviet-backed Syria.
So, if neocons were not big democracy boosters during their period of
greatest
influence under Reagan, when did they discover their religion? Most
analysts
date their conversion to the last half of the 1980s, when the "people
power"
movement ousted Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and when Chilean
strongman
Augusto Pinochet was defeated in a referendum to extend his rule. In
both
cases, prominent neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams
were
serving at the top of the State Department bureaus dealing with Asian
and
South American affairs. Neocon pundits were quick to embrace these
perceived
deviations from the "Kirkpatrick doctrine" as a necessary correction,
particularly in light of the winding down of the Cold War.
While Wolfowitz and Abrams sided with those who wanted to remove the
two
"friendly authoritarians," so did a significant number of Republican
lawmakers, some of them classic realists like Senator Richard Lugar,
who had
already broken with Reagan and the neocons over their support for South
Africa. In that respect, the neocons were as much fellow travelers as
they
were in the vanguard, as they like to claim.
The neocon record throughout the 1990s reinforced this conclusion.
Contrary to
myth, neocons, including Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary today
who is
widely considered the most Wilsonian on the neocon spectrum, did not
urge
former President George H. W. Bush to plant democracy in Baghdad during
the
1991 Gulf War. And although neocons did join with liberal hawks in
calling for
"humanitarian interventions" after the war, and subsequently in the
Balkans,
they remained well within what became the post-Cold War realist
consensus -
that elected, more or less democratic governments, so long as they were
not
hostile to the US, were to be preferred over "friendly authoritarians."
Thus, when the Algerian military abruptly canceled elections in
December 1991,
neither realists nor neocons objected, because the alternative was
thought
likely to bring to power an Islamist government potentially hostile to
the US,
and certainly to Israel. Indeed, in their book "An End to Evil"
published last
January, Richard Perle and David Frum cite Algeria as the reason why
they
support "democratization" in the Middle East, rather than "democracy"-
a
subtlety that would bring a smile even to the lips of ultimate realist
Henry Kissinger.
Similarly, when the neocons first began agitating for Saddam's removal
in
1995-96, their arguments were based entirely on classic realpolitik of
the
kind they used to defend Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Thus, a 1996
task force
advising Israeli candidate Benjamin Netanyahu, headed by Perle and that
also
included the Pentagon's current policy chief, Douglas Feith, as well as
David
Wurmser, a Middle East adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney, argued
that
ousting Saddam was the key to transforming the balance of power in the
Middle
East decisively in Israel's favor, permitting it to "break" with Oslo
and
dictate terms to Syria and the Palestinians.
A follow-up paper by Wurmser called for the region to be reorganized
according
to "tribal/clan/familial alliances" that would create a "more stable
balance
of power system." In 1998, when the neocons and Ahmad Chalabi were
steamrolling the Iraq Liberation Act through the US Congress, the
legislation's supporters, like the neocon-dominated Project for the New
American Century (PNAC), focused on the military threat posed by a
rearmed
Saddam. Even in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks,
when
PNAC warned that the failure to oust Saddam would constitute a
"decisive
surrender" to international terrorism, the democracy question was
simply
nowhere on the agenda.
It was only after the Afghanistan campaign that the neocons finally
began to
articulate the argument, denounced by one realist strategist as
"neo-crazy,"
that anti-American terrorism was caused by oppressive Arab autocracies,
and
that by invading and occupying the most oppressive such regime, in
Iraq, the
US could create a pro-Western, democratic government in the strategic
heart of
the Arab world that would, in turn, provoke sweeping regional change.
On the face of it, the argument has real appeal, particularly for the
more
idealistic neocons, such as Wolfowitz. To the increasingly pro-Likud
neocon
mainstream, however, it must sound like a great way to rally public
opinion
behind a war to permanently shift the balance of power in the Middle
East.
Jim Lobe is the correspondent of Inter Press Service in Washington.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thinking about Neoconservatism:
http://www.vdare.com/misc/macdonald_neoconservatism.htm | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jul 24, 2004 11:23 am Post subject: Imperial Hubris |
| From: TOOL
Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2004 06:24:20 EDT
You should really read Imperial Hubris. Anonymous is excellent. He writes about America being guilty about Israel, for no good reason and at too high a cost.
He was also interviewed by Wolfe Blitzer yesterday about Osama Bin Laden (OBL) and Israel.
He blew the myths out of the water when Wolfie asked him about OBL only recently grabbing Israel as for being hated. He told Wolfie that OBL has been speaking on that issue since 1979.
He also said that reforming the CIA etc was ridiculous! | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
