The Real David Petraeus Scandal

By Robert Wright,

When, in the fall of 2011, David Petraeus moved from commanding the Afghanistan war effort to commanding the CIA, it was a disturbingly natural transition. I say "natural" because the CIA conducts drone strikes in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region and is involved in other military operations there, so Petraeus, in his new role, was continuing to fight the Afghanistan war. I say "disturbingly" because this overlap of Pentagon and CIA missions is the result of a creeping militarization of the CIA that may be undermining America's national security.

This trend was clear during the Bush administration, but it accelerated under President Obama, who greatly expanded drone strikes, and it reached a kind of symbolic culmination when Obama nominated this four-star general to run things at Langley. That would have been the perfect time to reflect on the wisdom of the convergence of the CIA's and Pentagon's jobs. 

But, instead, the network of journalists, think tankers, public officials and others who constitute the foreign policy establishment preserved their nearly unblemished record of not focusing on the biggest questions.

There were exceptions, notably in the Washington Post. Its reporters raised the militarization issue shortly after Petraeus was nominated for the CIA post and then, the week before he took office, raised it again. Discussing the ongoing "expansion of the paramilitary mission of the CIA," Greg Miller and Judie Tate wrote:

The shift has been gradual enough that its magnitude can be difficult to grasp. Drone strikes that once seemed impossibly futuristic are so routine that they rarely attract public attention unless a high-ranking al-Qaeda figure is killed... The drone program has killed more than 2,000 militants and civilians since 2001, a staggering figure for an agency that has a long history of supporting proxy forces in bloody conflicts but rarely pulled the trigger on its own.

The militarization of the CIA raises various questions:

For example, if the CIA is psychologically invested in a particular form of warfare--and derives part of its budget from that kind of warfare--can it be trusted to impartially assess the consequences, both positive and negative, direct and indirect?

And then there's the transparency question. That Post piece noted concerns among some activists that "the CIA now functions as a military force beyond the accountability that the United States has historically demanded of its armed services. The CIA doesn't officially acknowledge the drone program, let alone provide public explanation about who shoots and who dies, and by what rules." 

Indeed, only a few months ago, in compliance with the War Powers Resolution, the Obama administration reported (vaguely) on targeted killings in Somalia and Yemen that had been conducted by the military, but not on those conducted by the CIA.

What's wrong with this opaqueness? 

For starters, you'd think that in a democracy the people would be entitled to know how exactly their tax dollars are being used to kill people--especially people in countries we're not at war with. But there's also a more pragmatic reason to want more transparency.

These drone strikes are a radical departure from America's traditional use of violence in pursuit of national security. In contrast to things like invading or bombing a country as part of some well-defined and plausibly finite campaign, our drone strike program is diffuse and, by all appearances, endless. 

Every month, God knows how many people are killed in the name of the US in any of several countries, and God knows how many of these people were actually militants, or how many of the actual militants were actual threats to the US, or how much hatred the strikes are generating or how much of that hatred will eventually morph into anti-American terrorism. 

It might behoove us, before we accept this nauseating spectacle as a permanent feature of life, to fill in as many of these blanks as possible. You can't do that in the dark.

That Post piece reported that the chief of the CIA's (burgeoning) Counterterrorism Center had told a colleague, "We are killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them now." 

This kind of claim seems to neglect the possibility that the drone strikes, especially given their intermittent killing of innocents, could in the long run generate so much hatred of America that they increase the rate at which terrorists are created. 

Coming from the guy who heads the part of the CIA that operates the drones, this simplistic language is not reassuring. If an opaque drone program means trusting people like this to do the smart thing, the case for transparency is strong.

I think history is going to judge American foreign policy in the Bush-Obama years harshly. 

But in many ways this president is no improvement over the last one, and Exhibit A is the acceleration of a far-flung drone-strike program that is shrouded in the secrecy of the CIA. The vision implicit in this program is of an America whose great calling is to lead the world into a future of chaos and lawlessness.

Via: "The Atlantic"

How Cash Has Corrupted Congress

An Occupy Wall Street press team member explains why members of Congress keep getting richer while the rest of the country has flatlined. 

By Jeff Smith 
Dec 28, 2011 4:45 AM EST 
Courtesy Of "The Daily Beast"

It’s always been about the money. Occupy Wall Street chose to set up its 24-hour outpost of political dissent on the doorstep of the finance industry primarily to underscore the simple fact that money has corrupted our political process so completely that the seat of power in the U.S. isn’t even in Washington, D.C. any more. That said, the Capitol continues collecting its cut, as evidenced in this week’s double-barreled dispatches, in the Washington Post and the New York Times, on the exploding wealth gap between our ever-more affluent representatives in Congress and the financially flat-lined citizens they represent.

From its inception, OWS has focused on the concept of legalized bribery, as the continually rising cost of a political campaign—an average of $1.4 million for a successful House run, up fourfold in real dollars since 1976, and nearly $10 million for a Senate seat—has been largely subsidized by wealthy donors, corporations and special interests, in return for legislation that favors their interests. It’s a form of regulatory capture that most first-world democracies outlaw as corruption, but that Americans know as “the way things are,” along with “ask your doctor” pharmaceutical ads and campaigns pitching products directly to young children. The result is an almost total lack of confidence in our elected officials, as reflected by Congress’ almost impossibly low 9 percent approval rating.

Even insider-trading laws don’t apply to our lawmakers, despite their regular access to valuable market information Joe Citizen will never hear, not to mention their power to tilt markets and pick winners and losers by removing a sentence from this piece of legislation, or adding a clause to that one.

The gap between the Beltway and the economic realities of most Americans can be found in the common Washington framing of households with an annual income of $250,000—a figure achieved by just the top 1.5 percent—as “middle class.” It’s understandable, since that’s not much more than the $174,000 base pay pulled in by rank-and-file members of both houses of Congress. That’s how rich our representatives have become.

While that salary actually has dipped slightly in inflation-adjusted dollars over recent decades, our representatives have kept getting richer. That’s both a reflection of the high cost of campaigns that effectively dissuade would-be candidates without ready money of their own or access to it from running, and the private profits many of our elected officials can and do claim once in office.

Win McNamee / Getty Images

The freshman class of 106 members elected last year, including many new Tea Party-backed Republicans, had a median net worth of $864,000—an inflation-adjusted increase of 26 percent from the 2004 freshmen. In the wake of a crushing recession, America’s politicians actually were richer, in part so they could foot their share of the bill, along with their donors, for the political ads that are expected to be one of the fastest-growing sources of television advertising revenue in 2012, breaking the spending record set in 2008.

A survey this year by the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research found that nearly one in four Americans couldn’t come up with even $2,000 in cash within 30 days if he or she had to, while another one in five would have to pawn or sell possessions or take out a payday loan. Compare that with our representatives in Washington’ median net worth of $725,000, excluding home equity—up more than 150 percent since 1984 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars. Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500, according to the University of Michigan’s Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

Taxation as a remedy to perpetual wealth is as much a part of the American legacy as a representative government, but the last 30 years have seen both taxes and representation recede. We now have a society with limited social mobility, where the advantages of wealth translate into preferred access to healthcare, education, business, and yes, even the political process.

The fact that Congress is moving away from the rest of the public is exactly why Occupy Wall Street has found such a giant hole in the political conversation to step into, and why our national representatives have kept their distance even when polls showed the public responding powerfully to our complaints and slogans. In a true market of political ideas, we’d have been prime targets for coopting. Instead, President Obama works “99 percent” into his speeches, and business as usual continues.

We now have a society where the advantages of wealth translate into preferred access to healthcare, education, business and yes, even the political process.

Despite such indifference, Occupy Wall Street resonated where previous protests petered out by creating and holding a physical space where it was impossible to avert one’s gaze. Members of the general public came to Occupy encampments all over the country to take in the scene and to participate, despite the disinterest shown by politicians and the glib tone of much of the mainstream press coverage. The occupation became an amplifier for those voices—not unlike the people’s mic itself—as the encampment in Zuccotti Park meant that a like-minded group in another city was now part of a national story that didn’t schedule its own ending like a traditional protest, and couldn’t easily be ignored. The 99 percent rediscovered the collective power of our voice, and started using it to make a whole lot of noise.

In 2012, expect to hear more of that noise from Occupy the Caucuses andOccupy Congress. Money talks, but we do too.

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Jeff Smith, a former advertising professional, is a member of the Occupy Wall Street press team.

How To Make The Super Congress Open and Accountable

The Last Thing We Need Is An All-Powerful Congressional Committee Allowed To Make Crucial Spending Decisions Without The Scrutiny Of An Engaged Citizenry and Press.

By Andre Francisco
August 15, 2011
Courtesy Of "Other Words"

As the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. In Washington, great power should also require great transparency.

The hurriedly passed Budget Control Act raised the nation's debt ceiling and made some efforts to reduce the deficit. The law also demands that Congress reduce the deficit another $1.2 trillion through spending cuts and additional revenue. The power to choose how those reductions will be concentrated in the hands of the 12 members of the Joint Select Committee on Debt Reduction, nicknamed the "Super Congress." 

Are you worried yet? Considering that the debt ceiling negotiations — including the idea to create this committee — were conducted mostly behind closed doors and in secret meetings, you should be.

The last thing we need is an all-powerful congressional committee allowed to make crucial spending decisions without the scrutiny of an engaged citizenry and press. The Project On Government Oversight (POGO), where I work, and other advocacy groups are calling on the Super Congress to deliberate in the open and make decisions based on what's best for the American public, not powerful special interests.

Corporate lobbyists are already lining up to meet with the newly appointed members of the debt committee, but none of these lobbyists are clamoring for a transparent process. They'd like nothing more than to be able to sway the committee behind the scenes, out of the public eye.

To prevent that type of influence peddling, POGO and its coalition partners sent an Aug. 8 letter to House and Senate leaders from both parties outlining steps they can take to ensure transparency.

Meetings convened by the Super Congress should be open to the public, broadcast live on its website, and archived online along with transcripts. In addition to the webcasts, all agendas, witness lists, and testimonies should be made publicly available online.

When defense, health, oil, and other industry lobbyists come knocking, the committee should post information about those meetings with staff and committee members to the website. This should include any written materials from the meetings and a summary of verbal communications. All committee and staff members should post their financial disclosure reports online.

As special interests assert their influence with campaign contributions, committee members should disclose those contributions within 24 hours of receiving them. Without these rules, special interests will have the loudest voice because they have the fattest checkbooks, and will have the most access in secret proceedings.

The timely posting of all of this information to the committee's website is only one aspect of transparency. The committee must also facilitate and accept public comments about any proposals. This is an important principle — and a part of federal rulemaking by agencies — but rarely, if ever, done by Congress. With the prospect that these debt reductions will deeply affect all Americans, it's an important step to take now.

The committee website should have an easy-to-use way for people to contact the committee and its staff. In addition, the committee should ask for and publish comments from the public about their report before a final vote. The final report should be posted at least 72 hours before the final vote to allow for public feedback.

To help the public provide an informed opinion on the committee's report, all proposals received by the Super Congress from standing congressional committees, as well as the Congressional Budget Office analyses of the numbers behind the committee recommendations, should be disclosed.

No matter what it decides, there will be plenty of contention over this committee and its report. Reducing at least $1.2 trillion in federal spending is a formidable task, but one that can only be completed with the utmost integrity if the process is open. The arguments of sensitivity or urgency don't trump the need for transparency and involvement by the public.

Andre Francisco is an associate with the Project On Government Oversight. www.pogo.org

Civilian Control Of US Military Is Deeply Threatened

A Military That Conducts Stealthy Night Raids, Secret Assassinations, and Death-Dealing Drones Is More Likely To Believe It Has The Right To Control America's Policy Abroad.

By Conn Hallinan
August 18, 2011
Courtesy Of "Alter Net"

For decades the U.S. military has waged clandestine war on virtually every continent on the globe, but, for the first time, high-ranking Special Operations Forces (SOF) officers are moving out of the shadows and into the command mainstream. Their emergence suggests the U.S. is embarking on a military sea change that will replace massive deployments, like Iraq and Afghanistan, with stealthy night raids, secret assassinations, and death-dealing drones. Its implications for civilian control of foreign policy promises to be profound.

Early this month, Vice Adm. Robert Harward—a former commander of the SEALs—the Navy's elite SOF that recently killed al-Qaeda leader Osma bin Laden—was appointed deputy commander of Central Command, the military region that embraces the Middle East and Central Asia. Another SEAL commander, Vice Adm. Joseph Kernan, took over the number two spot in Southern Command, which covers Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Obama Administration has been particularly enamored of SOFs, and, according to reporters Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post, is in the process of doubling the number of countries where such units are active from 60 to 120. U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Col. Tim Nye told Nick Turse that SOF forces would soon be deployed in 60 percent of the world's nations: "We do a lot of traveling."

Indeed they do. U.S. Special Operations Command (SOC) admits to having forces in virtually every country in the Middle East, Central Asia, as well as many in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. But true to its penchant for secrecy, SOC is reluctant to disclose every country to which its forces are deployed. "We're obviously going to have some places where it's not advantageous for us to list where were at," Nye told Turse.

SOF forces have almost doubled in the past two decades, from some 37,000 to close to 60,000, and major increases are planned in the future. Their budget has jumped from $2.3 billion to $9.8 billion over the last 10 years

teams, the Army's Delta Force, the Air Force's Blue Light and Air Commandos, plus Rangers and Green Berets. There is also the CIA, which runs the clandestine drone war in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

These Special Forces include the Navy's SEALs, the Marines Special Operations 

It is increasingly difficult to distinguish civilian from military operatives. Leon Panetta, former director of the CIA, is now Defense Secretary, while Afghanistan commander Gen. David Petraeus—an expert on counterinsurgency and counter terror operations—is taking over the CIA. Both have worked closely with SOF units, particularly Petraeus, who vastly increased the number of "night raids" in Iraq and Afghanistan. The raids are aimed at decapitating insurgent leadership, but have caused widespread outrage in both countries.

The raids are based on intelligence that many times comes from local warlords trying to eliminate their enemies or competition. And, since the raids are carried out under a cloak of secrecy, it is almost impossible to investigate them when things go wrong.

A recent CIA analysis of civilian casualties from the organization's drone war in Pakistan contends that attacks since May 2010 have killed more than 600 insurgents and not a single civilian. But a report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism at City University in London found "credible evidence" that at least 45 non-combatants were killed during this period. Pakistani figures are far higher.

Those higher numbers, according to Dennis C. Blair, retired admiral and director of national intelligence from 2009 to 2010, "are widely believed [in Pakistan] and, Blair points out, "our reliance on high-tech strikes that pose no risk to our soldiers is bitterly resented."

Rather than re-examining the policy of night raids and the use of armed drones, however, those tactics are being expanded to places like Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. The question is, who's next?

Latin America is one candidate.

A recent WikiLeaks release demonstrates that there was close coordination between right wing, separatist groups in eastern Bolivia—where much of that country's natural gas reserves are located—and the U.S. Embassy. The cables indicate that the U.S. Embassy met with dissident generals, who agreed to stand aside in case of a right-wing coup against the left-leaning government of Evo Morales. The coup was thwarted, but Bolivia expelled American Ambassador Philip Goldberg over U.S. meddling in its domestic politics.

The U.S. has a long and sordid history of supporting Latin American coups—at times engineering them— and many in the region are tense over the recent re-establishment of the U.S. Fourth Fleet. The latter, a Cold War artifact, will patrol 30 countries in the region. Given the Obama administration's support for the post-2009 coup government in Honduras, its ongoing hostility to the Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and now the WikiLeak revelations about Bolivia, the idea of appointing a "shadow warrior" the number two leader in South Command is likely to concern governments in the region.

SOFs have become almost a parallel military. In 2002, Special Operations were given the right to create their own task forces, separate from military formations like Central and Southern Command. In 2011 they got the okay to control their budgets, training and equipment, independent of the departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. If one reaches for an historical analogy, the Praetorian Guard of Rome's emperors comes to mind.

There is a cult-like quality about SOFs that the media and Hollywood has done much to nurture: Special Forces are tough, independent, competent and virtually indestructible. The gushy New Yorker magazine story about SEAL Team Six, "Getting Bin Laden," is a case in point. According to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, the story will be made into a movie-for-TV and released just before the 2012 elections.

There is a telling moment in that story that captures the combination of bravado and arrogance that permeates SOF units. An unidentified "senior Defense Department official" told author Nicholas Schmidle that the bin Laden mission was just "one of almost two thousand missions that have been conducted over the last couple of years, night after night." And then adds that these raids were routine, no big thing, "like mowing the lawn."

But war is never like "mowing the lawn," as 38 American and Afghan SOFs found out the night of Aug. 6 when their U.S. CH-47 "Chinook" helicopter flew into a carefully laid ambush just south of the Afghan capital of Kabul.

"It was a trap that was set by a Taliban commander," a "senior Afghan government official" told Agence France Presse. According to the official, the Taliban commander, Qari Tahir, put out a phony story that a Taliban meeting was taking place. When Army Rangers went in to attack the "meeting," they found the Taliban dug in and waiting. Within minutes the Rangers were pinned down and forced to send for help.

The Taliban had spent several years practicing for just such an event in the Korengal Valley that borders Pakistan. According to a 2009 Washington Post story—"Taliban Surprising U.S. Forces With Improved Tactics"—the Valley is a training ground to learn how to gauge the response time for U.S. artillery, air strikes and helicopter assaults. "They know exactly how long it takes before…they have to break contact and pull back," a Pentagon officer told the Post.

"The Taliban knew which route the helicopter would take," said the Afghan official, because "that is the only route, so they took position on either side of the valley on mountains and as the helicopter approached, they attacked it with rockets." According to Wired, the insurgents apparently used an "improvised rocket-assisted rocket," essentially a rocket-propelled grenade with a bigger warhead.

As soon as the chopper was down, the Taliban broke off the attack and vanished. According to the U.S., many of those Taliban were later killed in a bombing raid, but believing what the military says these days about Afghanistan is a profound leap of faith.

SOFs are not invulnerable, nor are they a solution to the dangerous world we live in. And the qualities that make them effective— stealth and secrecy—are in fundamental conflict with a civilian controlled armed forces, one of the cornerstones of our democracy.

As Adm. Eric Olson, former head of Special Operations, recently said at the Aspen Institute's Security Forum, having Special Forces in 120 countries "depends on our ability to not talk about it," and what the military most wanted was "to get back into the shadows."

Which is precisely the problem.

Conn Hallinan can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com.

When Did Questioning CIA Become Anti-American?

By David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: May 20, 2009
Updated 2 days ago
Courtesy Of The Raw Story

Since Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi suggested that the CIA misled her in 2002 concerning its use of waterboarding, the Republican Party has been attempting to paint her claims as outrageous.

Former CIA special agent and radio host Jack Rice finds the Republicans’ outrage unconvincing. He told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Tuesday, “What’s extraordinary here is the idea that if you would ever question the CIA, now all of a sudden somehow it’s anti-American.”

“What’s extraordinary to me is that I’ve seen the Republicans do this over and over,” Rice explained. “They will wrap something in the flag … and they will put a little lapel pin on it that says ‘national security.’ And if you ask a question about it, somehow you’re anti-American. And that’s what they’ve been trying to do to Nancy Pelosi for about six years.”

Rice has no illusions about the CIA’s vulnerability to pressure during the Bush administration. “Anybody who believes that an administration can’t push the Agency to do something is really missing the point,” he told Olbermann. “The fact that they can push the Agency and say, ‘This is what I’m looking for’ … will drive them to do certain things that may or may not be true — and that’s a big part of the problem that we’re facing right now.”

Rice believes, however, that Pelosi may yet have the last laugh. “I think in some ways she should be laughing, because in a way this is what she wanted,” he stated. “She wants the government to look at what the Agency did and didn’t do. It’s never been about her. It’s about us.”

This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown, broadcast May 19, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com
As charges fly back and forth concerning when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi might have been briefed by the CIA on its use of waterboarding, it is becoming clear that, at the very least, the CIA has been sloppy in its record-keeping.

Radio host and former CIA special agent Jack Rice told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, “What’s extraordinary here is the idea that if you would ever question the CIA now, all of a sudden, somehow it’s anti-American.”

“Anybody who believes that an administration can’t push the Agency to do something is really missing the point — because they can. The fact that they can push the Agency and say, ‘This is what I’m looking for,’ … to find that connection between al Qaeda and Iraq. … It will drive the Agency to react. It will drive them to do certain things that may or may not be true — and that’s a big part of the problem that we’re facing right now.”

“What’s extraordinary to me is that I’ve seen the Republicans do this over and over. They will wrap something in the flag … and they will put a little lapel pin on it that says ‘national security.’ And if you ask a question about it, somehow you’re anti-American. And that’s what they’ve been trying to do to Nancy Pelosi for about six years.”

“I think in some ways she should be laughing, because in a way this is what she wanted. She wants the government to look at what the Agency did and didn’t do. It’s never been about her. It’s about us.