Lest We Forget - The Big Picture Beyond U.S. Propaganda

By William Burr - Email: wburr@gwu.edu - Posting #160

The Making of the Cheney Regional Defense Strategy, 1991-1992

Declassified Studies from Cheney Pentagon Show Push for U.S. Military Predominance and a Strategy to "Prevent the Reemergence of a New Rival"

Washington, D.C., February 26, 2008 - The United States should use its power to "prevent the reemergence of a new rival" either on former Soviet territory or elsewhere, declared a controversial draft of the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) prepared by then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney's Pentagon and leaked to The New York Times in March 1992. Published in declassified form for the first time on the National Security Archive Web site, this draft, along with related working papers, shows how defense officials during the administration of George H. W. Bush, under the direction of Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Resources I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby tried to develop a strategy for maintaining U.S. preponderance in the new post-Cold War, post-Soviet era.

Remarkably, these new releases censor a half dozen large sections of text that The New York Times printed on March 8, 1992, as well as a number of phrases that were officially published by the Pentagon in January 1993. "On close inspection none of those deleted passages actually meet the standards for classification because embarrassment is not a legal basis for secrecy," remarked Tom Blanton, director of the Archive." The language that the Times publicized can be seen side-by-side with the relevant portions of the February 18, 1992 draft (see document 3 below) that was the subject of the leak.

In its initial response to the Archive's mandatory review request, the Department of Defense exempted from declassification all of the documents in this case on the grounds that they were "pre-decisional" in nature. When the Archive appealed the denials, we sent copies of The New York Times coverage of the leaked DPG, including the extensive excerpts from the February 18, 1992 draft. The appeal was successful because the Defense Department released considerable material on the Defense Planning Guidance; nevertheless Pentagon officials blacked out information that the Times had already published. (see sidebar).

The documents recently declassified by the Defense Department in response to the Archive's appeal provide an inside view of the making of the Defense Planning Guidance from September 1991 to May 1992, when Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz approved it. Writing in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, the group of Republican-oriented officials that produced the Guidance wanted to preserve the unique position of American predominance that was emerging. With the leak of a draft in March 1992 and the resulting public controversy over the language about preventing a "new rival," "Scooter" Libby and his colleagues recast the document so that it would pass public scrutiny while meeting Richard Cheney's requirements for a strategy of military supremacy. Believing that military spending at Cold War levels was no longer possible, Cheney and his advisers wanted to develop lower-cost strategies and plans to prevent future global threats to American power and interests. To protect U.S. territory, citizens, and military forces from attack, to back up security guarantees to allies, and to "preclude any hostile power from dominating a region critical to our interests," the authors of the Guidance argued that the United States had to:

▪ Pursue the "military-technological revolution" to preserve its superiority in the latest weapons systems (e.g., smart munitions)

▪ Sustain the "forward" presence of U.S. ground, air, and naval forces in strategically important areas, to validate commitments, and to provide a capability to respond to crises affecting significant interests, such as freedom of the seas and access to markets and energy supplies

▪ Preserve a smaller but diverse "mix" of survivable nuclear forces to support a global role, validate security guarantees, and deter Russian nuclear forces

▪ Field a missile defense system as a shield against accidental missile launches or limited missile strikes by "international outlaws"

▪ Maintain a capability to reconstitute military forces in the event a regional hegemon threatens to become a global threat

▪ Find ways to integrate the "new democracies" of the former Soviet bloc into the U.S.-led system

▪ Work with allies in NATO Europe and elsewhere but be ready to act unilaterally or with only a few other nations when multilateral and cooperative action proves too "sluggish" to protect vital interests.

The word "preempt" does not appear in the declassified language, but Document 10 includes wording about "disarming capabilities to destroy" which is followed by several excised words. This suggests that some of the heavily excised pages in the still-classified DPG drafts may include some discussion of preventive action against threatening nuclear and other WMD programs. The excisions are currently under appeal at the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP).

The drafts of the Defense Planning Guidance released by the Defense Department show the involvement of a number of senior and mid-level officials in the preparation of the document, some of whom have become well-known as figures in the "neo-conservative" movement. (Note 1) As mentioned earlier, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby played a significant role in the writing process, especially in the final stages. One of the drafters in the early stages was Abram N. Shulsky, a career Pentagon intelligence official, who later became notorious for his association with the Office of Special Plans during the run-up to the Iraq War. Although his name appears rarely in the recent release, a major figure in the writing was Zalmay Khalilzad, director of the Policy Planning Staff in Libby's office. Finally, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz was less involved in preparing the DPG, but had to approve its contents. Nevertheless, the DPG was written for a Secretary of Defense, Richard Cheney, who was more nationalist than "neo-con," although his thinking dovetails with elements of the neo-conservative outlook. In particular, the documents show (see Documents 6a and 6b) that he was closely involved in overseeing the process, and that Wolfowitz and Libby were careful to ensure that the language, such as on unilateral options, reflected his preferences.

Those who produced the DPG believed it would eventually become a public document that could be used to develop support for the Bush administration's military policy. Bill Clinton's victory in 1992 prevented that discussion. Despite the heavy excisions of these drafts, enough has been declassified to fuel a broader discussion of their meaning—for example, the relationship between the Guidance and neo-conservative ideology, or the extent to which ideas in the documents show continuity with U.S. national security policy, past and present. With respect to the continuity issue, some may argue that the pursuit of military superiority crystallized in the DPG resonates with the concept of national security which developed during the 1940s and which assumed the need for a "preponderance" of American power. (Note 2) Others may argue that the Clinton administration tacitly followed the thrust of the Cheney strategy, and that the emphasis on precluding rivals presages the preemptive doctrine that George W. Bush has tried to turn into an axiom of U.S. policy. (Note 3) According to James Mann, the Guidance helped provide the "rationale" for the policies that the Bush administration has followed since 2001. As Mann wrote in March 2004, the Iraq war "was carried out in pursuit of a larger vision of using America's overwhelming military power to shape the future." (Note 4) The documents raise other questions worth exploring, such as over the role of independent or unilateral action, the relationship between military and political power, and the extent to which superpower status confers diplomatic influence. If ISCAP releases more information from the documents, even more questions may be raised.

Documents

Document 1: Slides for "USDP [Under Secretary of Defense for Policy] Brief to DPRB [Defense Planning Resources Board] on June 5, 1991," Secret

Briefing slides prepared for Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz to be used in a presentation to the Defense Planning Resources Board, chaired by Deputy Secretary Donald J. Atwood, provide an overview of the process for preparing the DPG for fiscal years 1994-1998. Designed to take into account the lessons of the 1991 Gulf War, developments in the Soviet Union, and other "regional security challenges," and the implications of the "military-technological revolution" (e.g., emergence of "smart munitions"), the DPG would explain policy goals and military spending priorities for the years ahead. The slides optimistically forecast the completion of the Guidance in December 1991.

Document 2: Memo from Dale A. Vesser to Scooter, "First Draft of DPG," September 3, 1991, Secret, Excised Copy

Retired Army general Dale A. Vesser, who served as Assistant to Principle Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Strategy and Resources) "Scooter" Libby, played a key role in coordinating the DPG writing. As Vesser suggested, the first draft was "uneven," somewhat of a cut and paste job. It included contributions from a variety of working level defense officials, including an overview section prepared by Abram N. Shulsky. Paul Kozemchak, a career official at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was another major contributor. Andrew R. Hoehn, a staffer at Wolfowitz's office (and more recently a vice-president at the RAND Corporation), prepared the section on "The New Defense Strategy" at the end.

Composed in a world where the Soviet Union still existed, although not for long, the opening pages prepared by Shulsky declared that, with the Soviet Union's "internal economic crisis and political collapse," the United States "may be said to be the world's sole superpower." As such, it could not be the policeman of the world, but it would have "preeminent responsibility for addressing those wrongs which threaten not only its interests, but those of its allies and friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations." To preserve its preponderant position, the United States would have to curb regional challenges that—although not as dangerous as the former Soviet threat—could become "more likely." Above all, the United States would have to maintain technological superiority by staying a "generation ahead" in new weapons technology. According to Shulsky, that could mean reduced reliance on nuclear weapons by "developing new, more effective, conventional weapons systems."

The new policy would support alliances and multilateralism, but unilateral action remained a possibility. While the United States would continue to value alliances and working with allies, crises could "develop in areas outside of existing alliance commitments." Washington would try to work through the United Nations to the extent possible, but would retain "the responsibility to act on its own if the situation warrants."

The prospect that the Soviet Union or some other country could someday emerge as a global threat meant that the United States needed to maintain organizational and material resources to reconstitute military forces to "designated level of … capabilities." It was this requirement that led Andrew Hoehn to name the new strategy: "Crisis Response/Reconstitution Strategy." So that regional threats did not become global problems, Hoehn emphasized the importance of strategic nuclear deterrence based on a "diverse mix of survivable forces," a U.S. "forward" military presence at "reduced levels," and a capability to respond to regional crises "on very short notice."

As in the other draft DPGs included in this release, the sections on regional situations, such as Western Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America, are heavily excised.

Document 3: Dale A. Vesser to Secretaries of the Military Departments, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Program Analysis and Evaluation, and Comptroller of the Department of Defense, "FY 94-98 Defense Planning Guidance Sections for Comment," February 18, 1992, Secret, Excised Copy

[Excerpts from the leaked Defense Planning Guidance that The New York Times published on March 8, 1992, can be compared here with the excised version recently released by the Department of Defense through the National Security Archive’s mandatory review request.]

Drafting continued, but it was not until mid-February that the DPG had reached the point where Vesser was ready to distribute it to senior civilian and military officials at the Pentagon. Although the draft does not credit anyone for writing it, so far Khazilzad has received the most credit, although plainly his draft drew on the earlier work of Shulsky and Kozemchak, among others. While the draft was tighter and shorter, it was in the same conceptual universe. Now, however, it was called a "regional defense strategy" instead of a "Crisis/Response/Reconstitution Strategy." Like the earlier drafts, the possibility of "regional challenges" and the need for strategic deterrence, forward presence, crisis response, technological superiority, and reconstitution were central concepts. The draft, however, put more emphasis on the danger of WMD proliferation.

With the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a "fundamentally new situation," the drafters were preoccupied with identifying and articulating the mix of policies that would preserve the U.S.'s status as the sole superpower. In this respect, the Guidance posited two major policy goals. The first was "to prevent the reemergence of a new rival" for world power, which meant that Washington had to develop a "new order" that met the security, political, and economic interests of potential competitors, including Japan and Western Europe, so they would not feel the need to challenge U.S. "leadership." Moreover, the United States had to develop "mechanisms," such as a reconstitution capability, to deter potential competitors for military predominance. The second objective was to "address sources of regional conflict and instability" that could "unsettle international relations" by threatening U.S. interests or those of allies. The United States would have "preeminent responsibility" in checking threats that could involve proliferation, terrorism, or energy and raw materials sources. While Washington alliances would remain central to U.S. policy, the "United States should be postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated" or when a larger collective response needs jump-starting by an "immediate" U.S. response.

A long section of the document, beginning on page 30, details the "minimum military capabilities" that would be needed to support the regional strategy, including appropriate readiness levels, prepositioned supplies, war reserve inventories, strategic deterrence forces, and high priority areas for critical investments in conventional forces.

It was this draft that one of the recipients leaked to New York Times reporter Patrick Tyler sometime before March 7. The next day the Times ran a front-page story, "U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop." (Note 5) According to Tyler's account, the leaker "believes that this post-Cold War debate should be carried out in the public domain." Because Tyler had the entire document, his story in the Times and an accompanying side-bar included quotations and long passages which the Defense Department has excised in the recent release. Some examples: U.S. nuclear strategy must target "those assets and capabilities that current – and future – Russian leaders or other nuclear adversaries value most." Moreover, "to buttress the vital political and economic relationships we have along the Pacific rim, we must maintain our status as a military power of the first magnitude there." "While the United States supports the goal of European integration, we must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO."

Document 4: "Defense Planning Guidance, FY 1994-1999," February 29, 1992, Revised Draft for Scooter Libby, Secret, Excised Copy

This annotated but incomplete draft shows the impact of more editing, but the basic objectives and method, e.g., no "new rival" and the regional strategy, remained the same. This draft, however, introduced language about "strategic depth" that would survive further re-writing. The United States' success in pushing back former global threats, such as the Soviet Union, meant that a new strategic relationship with Eastern Europe and Eurasia was possible. That Washington faced no hostile alliances and that "no region of the world critical to our interests is under hostile non-democratic domination" meant that the United States had "great depth for our strategic position." Through a regional defense strategy, the United States could "take advantage of this position and preserve capabilities needed to keep threats small."

Document 5: Dale A. Vesser to Mr. Libby, "Comments Received on Draft DPG – Potential Issues," March 17, 1992, Secret, Excised Copy

This post-leak draft, with comments from a variety of Pentagon offices, showed the impact of disclosure and controversy, which had unfolded during the previous nine days. White House and State Department officials had called the DPG "dumb," Pentagon spokesperson Pete Williams disavowed some of the language, Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) criticized its "Pax Americana" thinking, and some foreign policy analysts observed that the report's "chauvinistic tone" might encourage other powers to try to catch up by procuring advanced weapons systems. (Note 6) Under the weight of the criticism, the wording about preventing a "new rival" disappeared, but, as James Mann has noted, the version worked out by Libby and his associates "contained most of the same ideas as the original" by coming up with "euphemisms in order to make the wording sound less confrontational." For example, instead of "preeminent responsibility," the new version used terms like "U.S. leadership," and "hostile power" instead of "rival."

The section on nuclear deterrence continued to focus on the need for a "hedge" against the emergence of a major threat, but it had a new emphasis on the necessity of missile defenses against the threat of global missile proliferation and the danger of an "accidental or unauthorized missile launch." Broaching the possibility of junking the ABM treaty, Libby's draft raised the prospect of a "day when defenses will protect the community of nations embracing liberal democratic values from international outlaws armed with ballistic missiles."

Document 6a: "Scooter" to Mr. Secretary, circa March 20, 1992, enclosing Libby memorandum to Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense, "Draft Defense Planning Guidance," 20 March 1992, enclosing "Defense Planning Guidance, FY 1994-1999," Secret, Excised copy

Document 6b: Lewis Libby memorandum for the Secretary through the Undersecretary of Defense (Policy), March 26, 1992, enclosing "Defense Planning Guidance, FY 1994-1999," Secret, Excised copy

The draft Guidance that was under discussion during March 1992 was getting closer to the version that would ultimately be released by the Defense Department, with the section on minimum military capabilities shorn off. As Libby explained to Cheney in a detailed cover memorandum on March 20, the draft was as "near to an unclassified text as possible in this stage of drafting." According to the memorandum, "Tab A" was the latest draft of the DPG, while Tabs "B" and "C" were unclassified and classified versions of the secret programming guidance. Neither was attached in the version received by the Archive; instead, Tab "B" was the material sent by Libby to Cheney on March 26 (see "6b" above).

In Libby's personal cover memo to Cheney (see 6a above) he alluded to the criticism that the February 18 draft stood for unilateralism. To counter this, he and Wolfowitz had come up with "more defensible" language found on page 12: "America must plan forces for major contingencies that would enable us to act where prudent and practical even ‘where very few others are with us,' and ‘with only limited additional help.'" Libby argued that there were "no major contingencies" where "we would not have at least political support from some limited number of countries."

The DPG draft that Libby sent Cheney on March 26 responded "more fully" to the Secretary's "guidance," including making the opening pages "sharper and tighter." Perhaps in response to Cheney's comments, the section on "Continued U.S. Leadership" included new wording about working with allies, but left open in explicit language the possibility of unilateral action (as earlier drafts had): "A future U.S. president will need to have options that will allow him to lead, and where the international reaction proves sluggish, or inadequate, to act to protect our critical interests." Further, "we will not ignore the need to be prepared to protect our critical interests and honor our commitments with only limited additional help, or even alone, if necessary." Such language would survive in later drafts.

Document 7: Dale A. Vesser to Mr. Libby, "Extracts from 18 Feb 92 DPG Draft," March 26, 1992, Secret, Excised copy
Believing that despite the controversy some of the February 18 draft still had value, Vesser suggested, first, points that should be reconsidered for including in the final draft, and second, points that were "properly deleted" or recast. One subject that Vesser thought was important was the definition of a "critical region": one "whose resources [and population] could, under consolidated control, generate global power." According to Vesser, that wording is "as thorough and concise as any." Vessey also made suggestions about earlier language on arms control, forward basing, crisis response strategy, and NATO. For example, he recommended reinstatement of the section on arms control, which argued that arms control "will take on new forms in this post-Cold War era," such as "regionally focused initiatives," and other "innovations in approach" to address the problem of WMD proliferation.

Document 8: Dave [David Shilling, Director of Plans] to Mr. Libby, "New Policy Directions in DPG," enclosing paper "New Policy Directions Noted in Draft Defense Planning Guidance," March 24, 1992, Prepared by Andrew Hoehn and Rod Fabrycky, Secret, Excised copy

Possibly used for briefing Cheney or some other senior official, this document provides some of the highlights of recent DPG drafts. Most of the language may be found in the versions cited above, but a few new points appear—for example, that a 7- 8 year "warning time" for the emergence of a major threat would kick in military reconstitution activities.

Document 9: Dale A. Vesser to Mr. Libby, "Abbreviated Scenarios for Inclusion in DPG – Issues?" circa April 11, 1992, Secret, Excised copy

An important element in the DPG process was the development of a scenarios paper that envisioned a number of possible regional crises that posed security threats to the interests of the U.S. and its allies, and the possible U.S. military response to those contingencies. Prepared for "illustrative" purposes, they depicted "plausible future events illustrating the type of circumstances in which the application of U.S. military power might be required." While speculative in nature, the group of scenarios would be used as an "analytic tool for the formulation and assessment of defense programs" and the sizing of "appropriate levels of combat power, mobility, readiness, and sustainment [sic]."

This document is massively excised, but an earlier version was the subject of a leak to New York Times reporter Patrick Tyler, even before that of the February 18 DPG draft. On February 16, 1992, Tyler published a story that showed that there were seven scenarios, including regional wars against Iraq and North Korea and a major campaign in Europe against a "resurgent Russia." In addition, U.S. forces were to be ready to respond to possible coups and instability in countries such as Panama or the Philippines.

According to Tyler's story, the source of the leak "wished to call attention to what he considered vigorous attempts within the military establishment to invent a series of alarming scenarios that can be used by the Pentagon to prevent further reductions in forces or cancellations of new weapons systems." (Note 7)

Document 10: "Issues in the Policy and Strategy Section," April 14, 1992, Secret, Excised copy

Reflecting the contention over the DPG, this paper highlights some of the more controversial points, such as the balance between unilateral and multilateral action and the role of allies, as well as whether to extend alliances to Eastern Europe. An interesting point on the bottom of the first page is excised, but the surviving language on "disarming capabilities" probably relates to the controversial notion of "preemptive" action against weapons of mass destruction held by adversaries.

Document 11: Distribution Memos, Secret

By April 16, the drafting process had reached the point where the DPG could be distributed somewhat more widely inside the Pentagon for comment on an "eyes only" basis. Among the outside recipients were Admiral Donald Pilling of the National Security Council staff and State Department Policy Planning Staff director Dennis Ross.

Document 12: Memo from Don Pilling, National Security Council, to Larry [Libby's assistant, Capt. Lawrence Seaquist], April 23, enclosing NSC comments
The April 16 DPG draft was not part of the recent release, but a significant chunk of it appears here with the NSC's editorial suggestions. This version is close to what Cheney ultimately approved for public dissemination in the last weeks of the Bush administration. The language showed continued reworking from the drafts that Libby had sent Cheney in March. For example, the section on "Defense Policy Goals" included language about the importance of a reconstitution capability as a signal "that no potential rival could quickly or easily gain a predominant military position." Perhaps the drafters believed that, despite the controversy, it was permissible and necessary to use language about precluding new rivals, certainly in a classified version. It is worth noting that wording excised from this document—such as Korean peninsula, Taiwan, India and Pakistan—appears in the version that Cheney publicly released in January 1993 (see Document 15).

As Pilling noted in his memo, some of the editorial suggestions were language designed to conform to scheduled speeches by President Bush. Some wording suggestions add to the discussion of the relationship between U.S. leadership and multilateral action, while others touch upon the flow of oil and regional arms control. As indicated on Pilling's memo, copies of the changes went to others on Libby's staff, including Khazilzad and Vesser.

Declassification Anomalies: This document is a near-final draft of the April 16, 1992, Defense Planning Guidance that Secretary Cheney issued in January 1993 in declassified form as the "Regional Defense Strategy" (see Document 15). Much of the language in the two documents is identical or nearly so. Nevertheless, the version of the April 16 draft as released by the Defense Department included excised words and phrases—such as Israel, Japan, India, Pakistan, and North Korean nuclear program—that later appeared in the unclassified strategy document. To illustrate this, the Archive has produced an edited version of Document 12, with the excised language filled in. Not all of the words and phrases that we have added are exact matches to the excised portions, but they are very close. These examples demonstrate the subjectivity of the declassification review process; that the country names appeared in a classified document made it look like the information was still sensitive, even though it was not.

Document 13: Annex A "Illustrative Planning Scenarios," Secret, Excised copy

Drafting and redrafting work on the planning scenarios continued as is evident from the four versions of the preface—with marginal comments excised in their entirety—in which drafters tried to be more and more concise about the role of the scenarios as "yardsticks" for formulating military programs.

Document 14: Wolfowitz to Secretary of Defense and Deputy Secretary of Defense, "Approval Draft of the Defense Planning Guidance – Action Memorandum," circa May 19, with attached memoranda on "Defense Planning Guidance – Major Comments Received," dated May 5 and May 13, 1992, Secret, Excised copy

By around May 19, 1992, work on the Guidance was finished. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell signed off on it and Paul Wolfowitz sent the document to Cheney and Atwood. Earlier in the month, Wolfowitz had sent them memos transmitting the DPG and the annex on "Illustrative Planning Scenarios," highlighting the problems that remained under discussion. In both versions, Wolfowitz observed that the current draft of the DPG "is still a rather hard-hitting document which retains the substance you liked in the February 18th draft." The drafts that Secretary of Defense Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Atwood received included footnotes indicating the concerns of various offices and individuals at the Pentagon on a number of issues, including missile defense, propositioning of supplies to help counter possible threats in Southwest Asia (SWA), and the extent to which a "major contingency in Europe" was plausible enough to be factored into the military planning. Wolfowitz's memorandum of May 13 mentions that he had received comments from David Addington, who was Cheney's special assistant and would work with him in the years to come (currently as Chief of Staff and Counsel to the Vice President).

Document 15: "Defense Strategy for the 1990s: The Regional Defense Strategy," Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, January 1993

Perhaps in light of George H. W. Bush's drive for re-election in the fall of 1992 and the need to avoid controversy, the thought of declassifying and publishing the Guidance must have become a low priority. Nevertheless, it happened in the administration's last month. The declassified version was not called the "Defense Planning Guidance," but it is very close to what is available of the April 16 version (see Document 12). As with the earlier drafts of the Guidance, Cheney's statement stressed strategic depth, technological superiority, strategic deterrence, forward presence, and reconstitution, all in the name of maintaining capabilities to check regional crises before they turned into more serious threats to U.S. security interests. While developing a "collective" response to threats had preference, as Libby had written before, "a future U.S. president will need options allowing him to lead and, where the international reaction proves sluggish or inadequate, to act independently to protect our critical interests." Moreover, the statement retained the language about the importance of a reconstitution capability to check a future "rival." The statement's release coincided with the approaching inauguration of the Clinton administration, which gave it no significant press coverage in January 1993, a stark contrast with the controversy over the DPG draft in March 1992.

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References: New Documents Detail America's Strategic Response to 9/11

1. For the most detailed account of how the DPG was prepared, see James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 208-215. For studies of neo-conservatism from different perspectives, see Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004); Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jacob Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neo-Cons (New York: Doubleday, 2008); and John Ehrman The Rise of Neo-Conservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1995 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

2. For "preponderance" and the Truman administration, see Melvyn P. Leffer, A Preponderance of Power: The Truman Administration and National Security Policy (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1992).

3. Also worth keeping in mind is the connection between the Defense Planning Guidance and the September 2000 report, "Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century," produced by the neo-conservative Project for the New American Century. Its authors include Libby, Shulsky, and Wolfowitz, and the report explicitly discusses the Planning Guidance.

4. James Mann, "The True Rationale: It's A Decade Old," The Washington Post, March 7, 2004. (Article used with the permission of the author and The Washington Post.) See also David Armstrong, "Dick Cheney's Song of America: Drafting a plan for global dominance," Harper's, January 2003.

5. Barton Gellman, another recipient of the leaked DPG, wrote a story a few days later: "Keeping U.S. First: Pentagon Would Preclude a Rival Superpower." The Washington Post, March 11, 1992.

6. "Senior U.S. Officials Assail Lone-Superpower Policy," and "Lone Superpower Plan: Ammunition for Critics," The New York Times, March 11 and 12, 1992. Patrick E. Tyler wrote both articles.

7. "Pentagon Imagines New Enemies to Fight in Post-Cold-War Era," The New York Times, February 17, 1992.

Lest We Forget - Philip Agee - CovertAction Quarterly

By Wikipedia - Posting #159 - Link B - Link C

The Early Years: Agee was born in Tacoma, Florida.[7] He graduated cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1956, and attended the University of Florida College of Law.[7]

Leaving CIA: Agee stated that his Roman Catholic social conscience had made him increasingly uncomfortable with his work by the late 1960s leading to his disillusionment with the CIA and its support for authoritarian governments across Latin America. He and other dissidents took encouragement in their stand from the Church Committee (1975-76), which cast a critical light on the role of the CIA in assassinations, domestic espionage, and other illegal activities.

In the book Agee condemned the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City and wrote that this was the immediate event precipitating his leaving the agency.

While Agee claimed that the CIA was "very pleased with his work",[2] offered him "another promotion"[2] and his superior "was startled"[2] when Agee told him about his plans to resign, the anti-communist journalist John Barron claims that Agee's resignation was forced "for a variety of reasons, including his irresponsible drinking, continuous and vulgar propositioning of embassy wives, and inability to manage his finances".[8]

Agee was accused by U.S. President George H. W. Bush of being responsible for the death of Richard Welch, a Harvard-educated classicist who was murdered by the Revolutionary Organization 17 November while heading the CIA Station in Athens. Bush had directed the CIA from 1976 to 1977.[9]

KGB/Cuban intelligence involvement: Oleg Kalugin, former head of the KGB’s Counterintelligence Directorate, states that in 1973 Agee approached the KGB's resident in Mexico City and offered a "treasure trove of information". The KGB was too suspicious to accept his offer.[10]

Kalugin states that:“ Agee then went to the Cubans, who welcomed him with open arms...The Cubans shared Agee's information with us. But as I sat in my office in Moscow reading reports about the growing revelations coming from Agee, I cursed our officers for turning away such a prize.[10] ”

For his part, Agee claimed in his later work On the Run that he had no intention of ever working for the KGB, which he still considered the enemy, and that he worked with the Cubans to assist left-wing and labour organizations in Latin America against fascism and CIA meddling in political affairs.

While Agee was writing Inside the Company: CIA Diary, the KGB kept in contact with him through Edgar Anatolvevich Cheporov, a London correspondent of the Novosti News Agency.[11]

Agee was accused of receiving up to $1 million in payments from the Cuban intelligence service. He denied the accusations, which were first made by a high-ranking Cuban intelligence officer and defector in a 1992 Los Angeles Times report.[12]

A later Los Angeles Times article stated that Agee posed as a CIA Inspector General in order to target a member of the CIA's Mexico City station on behalf of Cuban intelligence. According to the article, Agee was identified during a meeting by a CIA case officer.[13]

Book published: Because of legal problems in the United States, Inside the Company was first published in 1975 Britain, while Agee was living in London.[11] Playboy Magazine (August 1975) published excerpts from his book in the article titled "What You Still Don't Know About The CIA! Ex-Company Man Philip Agee Tells All".

Agee acknowledged that "Representatives of the Communist Party of Cuba also gave important encouragement at a time when I doubted that I would be able to find the additional information I needed."[2]

The London Evening News called Inside the Company: CIA Diary "a frightening picture of corruption, pressure, assassination and conspiracy". The Economist called the book "inescapable reading". Miles Copeland, Jr., a former CIA station chief in Cairo, said the book was "as complete an account of spy work as is likely to be published anywhere"[14] and it is "an authentic account of how an ordinary American or British 'case officer' operates...All of it...is presented with deadly accuracy."[15]

The book was delayed for six months before being published in the United States; it became an immediate best seller.[11]

Inside the Company: Inside the Company identified 250 alleged CIA officers and agents.[3] The officers and agents, all personally known to Agee, are listed in an appendix to the book.[16] While written as a diary, it is actually a reconstruction of events based on Agee's memory and his subsequent research.[17]

Agee writes that his first overseas assignment was in 1960 to Ecuador where his primary mission was to force a diplomatic break between Ecuador and Cuba, no matter what the cost to Ecuador's shaky stability, using bribery, intimidation, bugging, and forgery. Agee spent four years in Ecuador penetrating Ecuadorian politics. He states that his actions subverted and destroyed the political fabric of Ecuador.[5]

Agee helped bug the United Arab Republic code room in Montevideo, Uruguay, with two contact microphones placed on the ceiling of the room below.[5]

On December 12, 1965 Agee explains how he visited senior Uruguayan military and police officers at a Montevideo police headquarters. He realized that the screaming he heard from a nearby cell was the torturing of a Uruguayan, whose name he had given to the police as someone to watch. The Uruguayan senior officers simply turned up a radio report of a soccer game to drown out the screams.[5]

Agee also ran CIA operations within the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games and he witnessed the events of the Tlatelolco massacre.

Agee stated that President José Figueres Ferrer of Costa Rica, President Luis Echeverría Álvarez (1970–1976) of Mexico and President Alfonso López Michelsen (1974–1978) of Colombia were CIA collaborators or agents.[18]

Following this he details how he resigned from the CIA and began writing the book, conducting research in Cuba, London and Paris. During this time he alleges he was being spied on by the CIA.[5][18][19]

Expulsion: Agee became somewhat of a minor celebrity in the United Kingdom after the publication of Inside the Company. Agee revealed the identities of dozens of CIA agents in their London station.[11] After numerous requests from the American government as well as an MI6 report that blamed Agee’s work for the execution of two MI6 agents in Poland, a request was put in to deport Agee from the UK.[citation needed] Although Agee fought this and was supported by dozens of left wing MPs, journalists, and private citizens, he eventually departed from the UK on June 3, 1977, and traveled to the Netherlands.[20] Agee was also eventually expelled from the Netherlands, France, West Germany and Italy.

On January 12, 1975, Agee testified before the second Bertrand Russell Tribunal in Brussels that in 1960 he had conducted personal name checks of Venezuelan employees for a Venezuelan subsidiary of what is now Exxon. Exxon was "letting the CIA assist in employment decisions, and my guess is that those name checks...are continuing to this day." Agee stated that the CIA customarily performed this service for subsidiaries of large U.S. corporations throughout Latin America. An Exxon spokesman denied Agee's accusations.[15]

In 1978, Agee and a small group of his supporters began publishing the Covert Action Information Bulletin, which promoted "a worldwide campaign to destabilize the CIA through exposure of its operations and personnel." Mitrokhin states that the bulletin had help from both the KGB and the Cuban DGI.[20] The January 1979 issue of Agee's Bulletin published the infamous FM 30-31B, which the US government claims is a forgery.[21]

In 1978 and 1979, Agee published the two volumes of Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe and Dirty Work: The CIA in Africa which contained information of 2000 CIA personnel.[20]

Agee told Swiss journalist Peter Studer that “The CIA is plainly on the wrong side, that is, the capitalistic side. I approve KGB activities, communist activities in general. Between the overdone activities that the CIA initiates and the more modest activities of the KGB, there is absolutely no comparison.”[22][23]

Agee's US passport was revoked in 1979.[24][25] In 1980, Maurice Bishop's government conferred citizenship of Grenada on Agee, and he took up residence in that island. The collapse of the Grenada Revolution removed that safe haven, and Agee then was given a passport by the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. After a change of government there, this passport was revoked in 1990, and he was given a German passport, the nationality of his wife, ballet dancer Giselle Roberge. They later lived in Germany and Cuba. Agee was later readmitted to both the U.S. and United Kingdom.[26] Agee's own description of his odyssey was published in his autobiography, On the Run, in 1987.

Intelligence Identities Protection Act: In 1982, the United States Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), legislation that seemed directly aimed at Agee's works. The law would later figure in the investigation into the Valerie Plame scandal into whether Bush administration officials leaked a case officer's name to the media as an act of retaliation against her husband.[citation needed]

Late activities: Until his death, Agee ran a website in Havana, Cubalinda.com[27][28] which uses loopholes in American law to arrange holidays to Cuba for American citizens, who are generally prohibited by the Trading with the Enemy Act statute of US law from spending money in Cuba. In the 1980s NameBase founder Daniel Brandt had taught Agee how to use computers and computer databases for his research.[29] According to an author's biography attached to an essay by Agee in March, 2007 in the Alexander Cockburn-edited magazine Counterpunch, Agee "has lived since 1978 with his wife in Hamburg, Germany. He travels frequently to Cuba and South America for solidarity and business activities." The Cubalinda travel service was begun in 2000.

On December 16, 2007, Agee was admitted to a hospital in Havana, and surgery was performed on him due to perforated ulcers. His wife said on January 9, 2008 that he had died in Cuba on January 7 and had been cremated.[1]

Bibliography: Inside the Company: CIA Diary. Penguin. ISBN 0-14-004007-2.
Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe. Lyle Stuart. ISBN 0-88029-132-X. ASIN B000I8NARO.
Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa. Lyle Stuart. ISBN 0-81840-294-6.
On the Run. L. Stuart. ISBN 0-8184-0419-1.
White Paper Whitewash. Deep Cover Books. ISBN 0-940380-00-5.

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References:

NameBase

Philip Agee

NSC-68 - Link B

National Intelligence Book Center - Link B

Philip Agee - On Foreign Policy and Iraq Video 1/3

Philip Agee - On Foreign Policy and Iraq Video 2/3

Philip Agee - On Foreign Policy and Iraq Video 3/3

The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive

Inside The Company: CIA Diary

Philip Agee, 72; Agent Who Turned Against CIA

The Spy Who Stayed Out In The Cold

Big Business Seeks to Control and Influence U.S. Universities

Covert Action: The Roots of Terrorism - Links B C D

Bioterror: Manufacturing Wars The American Way

References continued.....

Court Filing: How 2004 Ohio Presidential Election Was Hacked

by Bob Fitrakis - Posting #158 - Gmap #1 - Gmap #2

A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.

Additionally, the filing contains the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Connell's company, GovTech Solutions. Also included that contract a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State's election night server layout system.

Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. Arnebeck asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. Spoonamore responded: "Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not."

Spoonamore explained that "they [SmarTech] have full access and could change things when and if they want."

Arnebeck specifically asked "Could this be done using whatever bypass techniques Connell developed for the web hosting function." Spoonamore replied "Yes."

Spoonamore concluded from the architectural maps of the Ohio 2004 election reporting system that, "SmarTech was a man in the middle. In my opinion they were not designed as a mirror, they were designed specifically to be a man in the middle."

A "man in the middle" is a deliberate computer hacking setup, which allows a third party to sit in between computer transmissions and illegally alter the data. A mirror site, by contrast, is designed as a backup site in case the main computer configuration fails.

Spoonamore claims that he confronted then-Secretary of State Blackwell at a secretary of state IT conference in Boston where he was giving a seminar in data security. "Blackwell freaked and refused to speak to me when I confronted him about it long before I met you," he wrote to Arnebeck.

Read the email correspondence here [pdf]

On December 14, 2007, then-Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, who replaced Blackwell, released her evaluation and validation of election-related equipment, standards and testing (Everest study) which found that touchscreen voting machines were vulnerable to hacking with relative ease.

Until now, the architectural maps and contracts from the Ohio 2004 election were never made public, which may indicate that the entire system was designed for fraud. In a previous sworn affidavit to the court, Spoonamore declared: "The SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its control."

Spoonamore also swore that "...the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers."

Project Censored named the outsourcing of Ohio's 2004 election votes to SmarTech in Chattanooga, Tennessee to a company owned by Republican partisans as one of the most censored stories in the world.

In the Connell deposition, plaintiffs' attorneys questioned Connell regarding gwb43, a website that was live on election night operating out of the White House and tied directly into SmarTech's server stacks in Chattanooga, Tennessee which contained Ohio's 2004 presidential election results.

The transfer of the vote count to SmarTech in Chattanooga, Tennessee remains a mystery. This would have only happened if there was a complete failure of the Ohio computer election system. Connell swore under oath that, "To the best of my knowledge, it was not a fail-over case scenario – or it was not a failover situation."

Bob Magnan, a state IT specialist for the secretary of state during the 2004 election, agreed that there was no failover scenario. Magnan said he was unexpectedly sent home at 9 p.m. on election night and private contractors ran the system for Blackwell.

The architectural maps, contracts, and Spoonamore emails, along with the history of Connell's partisan activities, shed new light on how easy it was to hack the 2004 Ohio presidential election.

Download the Plaintiffs' Brief here [zip]

Bob Fitrakis is co-counsel in the King Lincoln case.

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References: Forget Anonymous: Evidence Suggests GOP Hacked, Stole 2004 Election

Was Smartech In Control

Connell's Partisan Activities

Plaintiffs' Brief

The Eye Popping Fed Audit - Follow The Money Babe!

By Bernie Sanders - Posting #157

There is no better example of the US government's attitude of "let them eat cake" than the following alert presented by Vermont's Senator Bernie Sanders, who is the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history... I implore you to read -- and then re-read -- the results of this critical investigation.

The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. An amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to the Wall Street reform law passed one year ago this week directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct the study. "As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world," said Sanders. "This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you're-on-your-own individualism for everyone else."

Among the investigation's key findings is that the Fed unilaterally provided trillions of dollars in financial assistance to foreign banks and corporations from South Korea to Scotland, according to the GAO report. "No agency of the United States government should be allowed to bailout a foreign bank or corporation without the direct approval of Congress and the president," Sanders said.

The non-partisan, investigative arm of Congress also determined that the Fed lacks a comprehensive system to deal with conflicts of interest, despite the serious potential for abuse. In fact, according to the report, the Fed provided conflict of interest waivers to employees and private contractors so they could keep investments in the same financial institutions and corporations that were given emergency loans.

For example, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase served on the New York Fed's board of directors at the same time that his bank received more than $390 billion in financial assistance from the Fed. Moreover, JP Morgan Chase served as one of the clearing banks for the Fed's emergency lending programs.

In another disturbing finding, the GAO said that on Sept. 19, 2008, William Dudley, who is now the New York Fed president, was granted a waiver to let him keep investments in AIG and General Electric at the same time AIG and GE were given bailout funds. One reason the Fed did not make Dudley sell his holdings, according to the audit, was that it might have created the appearance of a conflict of interest.

To Sanders, the conclusion is simple. "No one who works for a firm receiving direct financial assistance from the Fed should be allowed to sit on the Fed's board of directors or be employed by the Fed," he said.

The investigation also revealed that the Fed outsourced most of its emergency lending programs to private contractors, many of which also were recipients of extremely low-interest and then-secret loans.

The Fed outsourced virtually all of the operations of their emergency lending programs to private contractors like JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo. The same firms also received trillions of dollars in Fed loans at near-zero interest rates. Altogether some two-thirds of the contracts that the Fed awarded to manage its emergency lending programs were no-bid contracts. Morgan Stanley was given the largest no-bid contract worth $108.4 million to help manage the Fed bailout of AIG.

A more detailed GAO investigation into potential conflicts of interest at the Fed is due on Oct. 18, but Sanders said one thing already is abundantly clear. "The Federal Reserve must be reformed to serve the needs of working families, not just CEOs on Wall Street."

To read the GAO report, click here.

Bernie Sanders is the independent U.S. Senator from Vermont. He is the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history. He is a member of the Senate's Budget, Veterans, Environment, Energy, and H.E.L.P.

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References:

The GAO Report [PDF]

About Bernie Sanders

MONEY,BANKING, AND CREDIT

On 9/11 The American and Israeli Governments Entered The Realm of Unspeakable Evil

By The Excavator - Posting #156

"There exist in the life of societies as well as individuals hours of moral discomfort when despair and fatigue spread their leaden wings over human beings. Men then begin to dream of nothingness.

The end of everything ceases to be "undesirable" and its contemplation is in fact soothing." - Charles Nordmann in July 1913. (The quote is taken from Modris Eksteins's book 'Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age.' Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1989, Pg. 54).

The Middle East is experiencing today what Europe went through in the summer of 1914 before the Great War began. Tensions are high and war is on the mind of every man, woman and child in Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Except this time the people are not overjoyed with thoughts of war. There is no honour or glory to be found in war. The only maniacs who want war are the devilish neocons; the extremist leaders of Israel, America, and Western banking oligarchs who make money off of war by selling arms and lending interest based money to the largest war machine on Earth.

All three regimes want and need an external enemy to direct their people's attention away from other problems that are plaguing their countries. The thorn in Israel's side is a new, internationally recognized Palestinian state that is expected to be officially announced in September at the United Nations. The Iranian regime is under threat by an avalanche of anger from the country's young people who want more rights and greater economic security.

But the regime that is most at risk of collapsing is the oligarch-owned U.S. shadow security state. Washington is facing an apocalyptic economic crisis, rising populist anger and rising unemployment, none of which will be addressed in any meaningful way by the current crop of traitors, whores and cowards who make up the U.S. Congress, (with a couple of exceptions like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich).

So, expect calls for war against Iran to get louder in the pseudo mainstream press in the coming weeks and months.

On Tuesday, July 12, former CIA official Robert Baer expressed his concerns to Ian Masters, host of KPFK's Background Briefing, that the Israeli government is seriously thinking about attacking Iran in September. Baer's comments come in the wake of public statements made by former Mossad Chief Meir Dagan about the very real possibility that Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel's Minister of Defense Ehud Barak will strike Iran's nuclear sites.

Baer said the U.S. military can't do anything to stop Israel even if it wanted to. But I don't buy that. I refuse to believe that an empire can be bullied into a war by such a tiny nation. Besides, the U.S. military higher-ups have a lot to gain if Israel attacks Iran.

America needs a new cast of revolutionaries to dig the country out of the hole it has been buried in. But first the American people must wake up. The Evil Establishment can kill a revolutionary here and there, but it is weak against a massive people's movement. President John F. Kennedy got murdered and his heroic deed was erased from mainstream history because he went against the grain alone.

If you stand up for your country in Washington then you are either killed (Kennedy, Paul Wellstone) or thrown in jail on false charges (James Traficant). That's why changing a society requires more than the acts of brave men in power: it requires Ban aware and informed citizenry. The sacrifice of heroes is wasted if the people are not intelligent enough to recognize and praise their heroism. The people must be ready to hear the truth at all times and be able to recognize the honest leaders while ignoring the false preachers like Bush and Obama. And above all, the people need to see evil for what it is instead of making excuses and pretending that the truth is just a crazy conspiracy theory.

The term "unspeakable evil," is used by author and peace activist James W. Douglass in his book, 'JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters,' to refer to Kennedy's assassination by the goons who control the U.S. shadow security state. Douglass borrowed the term from the Christian monk Thomas Merton who wrote a book called 'Raids on the Unspeakable.'

Douglass's book on JFK will go down as one of the most important contributions to American history. The book can help change the world for the better because it changes your perceptions of the last sixty years of American history and enables you to rethink present problems in a historical context. The horrific events of 9/11 just scratch the surface of the tyranny within America. The roots go much deeper.

Douglass highlights JFK's spiritual maturity and intellectual understanding of the evils from within Washington that confronted the American Republic during the height of the Cold War, and which still confront it fifty years later as another nuclear crisis looms over Washington. It is the world's bad luck that there isn't a President with Kennedy's courage and sense of patriotism in the White House today.

After President Kennedy was killed, the White House became a place for Satan's guests. Vultures and demons started gathering around the oval office in the form of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and others who spewed words of poison and lies into the ears of government officials, and members of the press.

This gang stuck around longer than they should have been allowed to if honest caretakers were in charge in Washington. They committed a grand act of "unspeakable evil," on September 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 innocent citizens with the help of Israel's Mossad and the leaders of the CIA et al.

Those of you who are not convinced that the neocons were capable of doing evil on a large scale then you should read their own words and learn for yourself about how evil and manipulative they really are.

Michael Ledeen, an arch-neoconservative hawk and a Machiavelli devotee, praised the art of destruction in his 2002 book, 'The War Against the Terror Masters':

"Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace." (Quote is taken from John Laughland's July 2003 article called 'Flirting with Fascism').

Ledeen is no mere scholar talking to himself inside a chambers of echoes. When the neocon gang was running Washington his crazy ideas were put into action by none other than Bush's right-hand man, Karl Rove, as well as "repeated daily by such figures as Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz," according to William O. Beeman.

Like other neocons, Ledeen wholeheartedly believes that the end justifies the means. One of their philosophical beliefs is that the path to success in politics is through deception and trickery. Another is that the State must do acts of evil to achieve good change (what is good in their judgement, not the public's judgement).

In his 1999 book, 'Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago,' Ledeen wrote:

"In order to achieve the most noble accomplishments, the leader may have to ‘enter into evil.’ This is the chilling insight that has made Machiavelli so feared, admired, and challenging. It is why we are drawn to him still..." (Quote is taken from Katherine Yurica's February 2004 article called 'The Despoiling of America').

Ledeen was no doubt celebrating with his comrades when America entered the realm of evil on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Ledeen's biggest business is telling lies and instilling fear in people about non-existent external threats like Al-Qaeda, Iraq, Syria, and Iran for the political and financial gain of a selfish and cruel elite. Ledeen warmongers in these two speeches: November 2009 speech; and April 2010 speech. In both speeches Ledeen lies with a straight face, saying that Iran is America's biggest enemy, that its leadership can't be reasoned with, and that Israel and the U.S. should attack it sooner rather than later.

If Ledeen, the neocons, and Netanyahu have their way the entire Middle East (except for Israel) will be an inferno. These people need to be arrested and hanged as war criminals.

Listen to this CBC report called 'This country of unspeakable evil' from April 23, 1945 when world war two was reaching its end and the Nazi regime was about to collapse. The crimes of that era by all governments involved in the war are being repeated today in America, the Middle East and Israel. Although the historical and political context is different, the crimes that are being committed today by the U.S. and Israeli governments in the name of "freedom," "democracy," and "security," are classifiable as "unspeakable evil."

Why have we forgotten so soon that civilization gets destroyed and civil order breaks down when the people stand by and do nothing as their government leaders commit unspeakable acts of evil in their name?

If you have a heart, and if you have a brain then take a stand on 9/11. Support a new investigation into the attacks. Remember what Martin Luther King Jr. said about the sins of silence. Remember what John F. Kennedy did to save America and the world from a catastrophic nuclear war. Remember what Robert F. Kennedy said about the disease of violence:

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember - even if only for a time - that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek - as we do - nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Those men were true heroes. James W. Douglass and other renegade historians have done great work to help us learn what they did for humanity, and why they were killed. They were revolutionaries and patriots who risked their lives by speaking up because that is what history demanded of them.

Today, history demands of us to remember the heroic deeds of Dr. King, President Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy, and to finish what they started in the dark by bringing their murderers and the murderers behind the 9/11 attacks to light. Our generation has no greater task than to bring justice to the victims of state violence and state terror.

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References:

Israel Lobby Dominates Congress, Media Covers it Up

The Excavator

9/11: STARTING OVER WITH THE TRUTH– Part One

By Susan Lindauer - Posting #155

Dedicated to TJ Bronco and Eddie Sengola—Semper fi

When I recall the summer of 2001 and our last days of innocence before the 9/11 attack, I often think of Guy Clark’s old song, “Like Desperadoes Waiting for a Train.”

I remember the heartbreak of it vividly. That’s because our team gave advance warnings about the 9/11 attack in precision detail. On command of my CIA handler, I also delivered threats to Iraqi diplomats at the United Nations of the consequence of War should Baghdad withhold actionable intelligence about the 9/11 conspiracy.

Throughout that hot summer, we understood exactly how 9/11 would play out— with airplane hijackings and a strike on the World Trade Center. We had a good idea of the timing. And we projected the use of a miniature thermo-nuclear device. Yet for all that we tried, we could not stop it. Forces had been set in motion. Responsive actions to our urgent appeals for help— which should have been automatic—got ignored.

Above all, we could not fathom that another competing team would sneak in and wire explosives to bring down the Towers—And that’s exactly what happened.

We shouted from the rooftops. We joked in phone conversations that “the NSA should wake up and pick up the phones. You guys at NSA have been tapping our phones for years, so you could catch this call. Don’t sleep through it now. Hello NSA. Pick up the phone!” When new neighbors showed up with a moving van that July, I joked they might go back where they came from, if they heard our conversation about this World Trade Center attack.

After 9/11, I wept for those conversations. By August, our team was so anxious about the “imminent” timing of the attack that my CIA handler, Dr. Richard Fuisz instructed me to go the extra mile to notify the Justice Department and the White House, so both sides of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement could mobilize together to block it.

Our actions that August will be outlined in my next article. It put our team—including Dr. Richard Fuisz and Paul Hoven— at the eye of the storm that would become the 9/11 cover up. Our efforts robbed the Bush Administration of deniability, making us a serious threat to the story they desired to sell on the FOX News Channel and the Sunday morning talk shows. Notoriously, I would get slapped with the Patriot Act and locked in prison on Carswell Air Force Base in Texas. When incarceration failed to break my spirit or frighten me out of speaking, they threatened me with forcible drugging with Haldol, Ativan and Prozac to chemically lobotomize me into silence.

Because truth does matter. So much of America’s national security and terrorism policy has been predicated on mistaken assumptions about that day. Ignorance has inflicted a terrible cost on America’s foreign policy, pushing the United States into two catastrophic Wars, and drowning our Middle Class in red ink and deficit spending to beef up profit margins for defense contractors.

Once Americans understand 9/11 as a collision of special interests, our country should be able to sweep away the false construct that has become the War on Terrorism. We should be freed to create a more effective strategy for protecting our nation’s security, without exaggerating threats and manufacturing fresh hostilities against us.

Because there was no external enemy threatening our country on that terrible day. Just Us. It was always Us.

Argumentum Ad Numeram

That’s not what the corporate media wants America to think. The official 9/11 story relies on a principle called “argumentum ad numeram–” the notion that an idea becomes truthful because large numbers of people believe it. I have choked to hear the babbling of the media describe 9/11 with post-it sticker smiley faces. It’s glib and trite and inaccurate.

The Corporate Media guessed wrong in the first hours and days after the attack. Over the years the media discredited itself further by protecting those mistakes, rather than confess that pundits had no idea what they were talking about in the first place.

Americans aren’t fooled. They know the official story is bunk. People want to know what really happened. And they have a right to know.

Citizens 9/11 Commission Campaign

For those reasons, I wholeheartedly endorse the new Citizens 9/11 Commission Campaign http://www.911cc.org. Organizers intend to file ballot propositions in Oregon, Massachusetts and other states. When passed, the ballot initiative would create a powerful, independent 9/11 Commission vested with subpoena authority and the ability to collect testimony under oath. Largely free of governmental interference, the Citizens 9/11 Commission would be headquartered in the first state to pass the ballot measure.

“We believe we have a winning approach: the method of direct democracy—” says former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel and President of the Democracy Foundation, which has launched the 9/11 Campaign. Gravel is best known for his Senate filibuster that ended the draft after Vietnam, and for reading the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record.

“The 9/11 movement’s successful decade of citizen education can now give way to an actionable citizen’s plan for change that will create a new investigation!”

For myself, an opportunity to testify before a 9/11 Citizens Commission—no holds barred— would be a huge relief. These articles scratch the surface. There’s much more depth that could be related under oath.

Hijackings or Demolitions?

An effective 9/11 Citizens Commission would do more than demolish the official 9/11 story. It would also shatter the false constraints imposed by the 9/11 Community on itself.

The trouble is that Americans are inclined to trust a limited range of options. Either they believe airplane hijackings alone brought down the towers— or they insist that only a controlled demolition of the Towers using explosives accomplished the deed— as if the two must have been mutually exclusive events.

Both are mistaken. The World Trade Center suffered BOTH hijackings AND a controlled demolition.

Fire fighters and building maintenance crews reported explosions popping through the Towers like fireworks. And they weren’t shy about reporting it. However for reasons that are incomprehensible and grossly irresponsible, the corporate media took the government bait, and oversimplified the 9/11 conspiracy to erase nagging inconsistencies from human consensus. 9/11 was groupthink at its most refined.

Once you understand how competing events collided during that sweltering month of August, 2001, you will understand how and why.

Motive and Opportunity

Any police officer will tell you a crime requires two things: motive and opportunity. That’s been missing from the 9/11 debate until now. Advance knowledge about the hijacking conspiracy created “opportunity” for taking 9/11 to the next level of absolute destruction. Iraq upped the ante, and created motivation to guarantee maximum destruction—a competing agenda that collided with efforts to stop the attack.

Most importantly, the decision to go on a War footing against Iraq, in response to the hijacking attack, was made before 9/11 occurred, not after. That’s critical to understanding why Cabinet level officers of the White House took no action to deploy NORAD or post an anti-aircraft battery on top of the Twin Towers, which would have been very easy to do. Advance knowledge of the consequence of War with Iraq created an overwhelming provocation for an orphan team to wire the building with explosives. Likewise, knowledge of the timing of the attack, its method of operation—and the low sophistication of the hijackers’ flying skills (watched by foreign intelligence)— had been identified far enough in advance that it was relatively easy to prepare the explosives. It was easy enough to anticipate that a dramatic collapse of the buildings would maximize the media impact, which could be exploited to stampede Americans into War with Iraq.

Yes, that’s despicable. And it’s exactly what they did.

U.S. Threats to Iraq

The dynamic building into 9/11 started in April, 2001. I was summoned to my CIA handler’s office in Great Falls, Virginia to receive a message for Iraqi diplomats—exactly what my back channel existed for. The message demanded that Baghdad hand over any fragment of intelligence involving airplane hijackings, or face military retribution if the U.S. discovered Baghdad had possessed that knowledge and took no action to warn us.

At that very moment, two special things were happening: 1) international loathing was pushing an end to U.N. sanctions on Iraq, which had caused the deaths of 1.7 million Iraqis, including 1 million children under the age of 5, according to World Health statistics. And 2) unbeknownst to Americans or the international community, the U.S. and Baghdad were engaged in highly productive back channel talks for a comprehensive peace framework that would have achieved all U.S. objectives, including preferential contracts for U.S. corporations after sanctions in oil, telecommunications, hospital equipment and pharmaceuticals, transportation and non-dual use factory equipment.

In April, my first instinct was to soft pedal the U.S. threat. No need to upset diplomatic advances, right? As it happened, in February, 2001 Baghdad had already invited the FBI to send an Anti-Terrorism Task Force into Iraq—seven months before the 9/11 strike. So when I requested intelligence on the 9/11 Conspiracy in April, the Iraqis responded enthusiastically. They welcomed the United States to go ahead and send the FBI right away, so the U.S. could get what we wanted. (The original 9/11 Commission never got to hear about Iraq’s welcome to the FBI, either).

When I reported back on my trip to New York, I was quite pleased. However Dr. Fuisz stormed his office yelling that I had not sufficiently conveyed the force of the U.S. threat. I was to go back to the Iraqi Embassy forthwith, and inform Baghdad that “Iraq would be bombed back to the Stone Age, worse than anything they had suffered before if it was discovered they had concealed any fragment of intelligence involving airplane hijackings.”

Dr. Fuisz instructed me to warn Baghdad those “threats of War did not come from him or anyone at the CIA. Threats of War originated at the highest levels of government far above the CIA Director and the Secretary of State.”

Only three men fit the bill: President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Of course I did as instructed. Observing his fury, I understood with a jolt that the hijacking threat was considered “highly credible” and “validated.” In June and July, weekly meetings with Dr. Fuisz got more agitated. We talked about 9/11 practically every week. We regarded the terrorist scenario as inevitable, if intervention failed. I began to tell civilian friends with ties to New York that the CIA expected a major attack on southern Manhattan involving airplane hijackings and a strike on the World Trade Center.

Dr. Parke Godfrey, a professor of computer science at York University in Toronto, would later testify in the Federal Courthouse for the Southern District of New York— 1,000 yards from where the Twin Towers had once graced the skyline—that several times over the spring and summer I told him that we expected “airplane hijackings and a reprise of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center that would finish the cycle.” I told him the attack was expected in “late summer, early autumn.” And I told him we expected “mass casualties” and speculated about the “possible use of a miniature thermo-nuclear device.”

On August 2, 2001, the Senate held confirmation hearings for Robert Mueller to head the FBI. Dr Fuisz suggested that perhaps the FBI Director’s chair would be vacant when the 9/11 attack occurred.

That’s when Dr. Fuisz and I mapped out a path of action that would undercut the entire 9/11 mythology, and paint a bulls eye on my back for the 9/11 Cover Up.

Alas, no good deed goes unpunished in Washington. Somebody would have to pay for knowing about 9/11, and it would turn out to be me.

As luck would have it, the Feds didn’t count on one thing that would scotch the government’s plan to imprison me indefinitely for up to 10 years with forcible drugging to boot— and torpedo the official 9/11 story out of the water:

When Dr. Fuisz told me in August that the 9/11 attack was considered “imminent,” I called my friend, Parke Godfrey, whose family lived in the wealthy suburbs of Connecticut.

I warned him to stay the hell out of Manhattan.

Next in this series: August, 2001—

Organizers of the Citizens 9/11 Commission Campaign have asked me to lay out evidence, but not draw conclusions. They argue, quite reasonably, that the Citizens 9/11 Commission should be the appropriate body to draw conclusions once all evidence and testimony has been taken from every possible source.

9/11 Whistleblower, Susan Lindauer is the author of “Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq.”

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References:

Former Counterterrorism Czar Accuses Tenet, Other CIA Officials of Cover-Up

THE MISSING SECURITY TAPES FROM THE WORLD TRADE CENTER

Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act, the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq

United States: Investigate Bush, Other Top Officials for Torture

By Human Rights Watch - Posting #154

Investigate Bush, Other Top Officials for Torture

(Washington, DC) - Overwhelming evidence of torture by the Bush administration obliges President Barack Obama to order a criminal investigation into allegations of detainee abuse authorized by former President George W. Bush and other senior officials, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The Obama administration has failed to meet US obligations under the Convention against Torture to investigate acts of torture and other ill-treatment of detainees, Human Rights Watch said.

The 103-page report, "Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees," presents substantial information warranting criminal investigations of Bush and senior administration officials, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA Director George Tenet, for ordering practices such as "waterboarding," the use of secret CIA prisons, and the transfer of detainees to countries where they were tortured.

"There are solid grounds to investigate Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tenet for authorizing torture and war crimes," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "President Obama has treated torture as an unfortunate policy choice rather than a crime. His decision to end abusive interrogation practices will remain easily reversible unless the legal prohibition against torture is clearly reestablished."

If the US government does not pursue credible criminal investigations, other countries should prosecute US officials involved in crimes against detainees in accordance with international law, Human Rights Watch said.

"The US has a legal obligation to investigate these crimes," Roth said. "If the US doesn't act on them, other countries should."

In August 2009, US Attorney General Eric Holder appointed Assistant US Attorney John Durham to investigate detainee abuse but limited the probe to "unauthorized" acts. That meant the investigation could not cover acts of torture, such as waterboarding, and other ill-treatment authorized by Bush administration lawyers, even if the acts violated domestic and international law. On June 30, Holder accepted Durham's recommendation to carry out full investigations of two deaths in CIA custody, reportedly from Iraq and Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch said that the narrow scope of Durham's inquiry failed to address the systemic nature of the abuses.

"The US government's pattern of abuse across several countries did not result from the acts of individuals who broke the rules," Roth said. "It resulted from decisions made by senior US officials to bend, ignore, or cast the rules aside."

In citing the four top-level Bush administration officials, Human Rights Watch said that:

* President Bush publicly admitted that in two cases he approved the use of waterboarding, a form of mock execution involving near-drowning that the United States has long prosecuted as a type of torture. Bush also authorized the illegal CIA secret detention and renditions programs, under which detainees were held incommunicado and frequently transferred to countries such as Egypt and Syria where they were likely to be tortured;

* Vice President Cheney was the driving force behind the establishment of illegal detention and interrogation policies, chairing key meetings at which specific CIA operations were discussed, including the waterboarding of one detainee, Abu Zubaydah, in 2002;

* Defense Secretary Rumsfeld approved illegal interrogation methods and closely followed the interrogation of Mohamed al-Qahtani, who was subjected to a six-week regime of coercive interrogation at Guantanamo that cumulatively appears to have amounted to torture;

* CIA Director Tenet authorized and oversaw the CIA's use of waterboarding, stress positions, light and noise bombardment, sleep deprivation, and other abusive interrogation methods, as well as the CIA rendition program.

In media interviews, Bush has sought to justify his authorization of waterboarding on the ground that Justice Department lawyers said it was legal. While Bush should have recognized that waterboarding constituted torture without consulting a lawyer, there is also substantial information that senior administration officials, including Cheney, sought to influence the lawyers' judgment, Human Rights Watch said.

"Senior Bush officials shouldn't be able to shape and hand-pick legal advice and then hide behind it as if it were autonomously delivered," Roth said.

Human Rights Watch said the criminal investigation should include an examination of the preparation of the Justice Department memos that were used to justify the unlawful treatment of detainees.

Human Rights Watch also said that victims of torture should receive fair and adequate compensation as required by the Convention against Torture. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have successfully kept courts from considering the merits of torture allegations in civil lawsuits by making broad use of legal doctrines such as state secrets and official immunity.

An independent, nonpartisan commission, along the lines of the 9-11 Commission, should be established to examine the actions of the executive branch, the CIA, the military, and Congress, with regard to Bush administration policies and practices that led to detainee abuse, Human Rights Watch said. Such a commission should make recommendations to ensure that the systematic abuses of the Bush administration are not repeated.

Author Caveat: I do not support any commission that comes anywhere close to the 9/11 commission that proved to be nothing more than a whitewash. For emphasis, I do support an "International", independent, non corrupt investigation/commission, and one whose members are not part of any established New World Order secretive group.

This investigation/commission should be established to investigate/examine the actions of the executive branch, the CIA, the military, and Congress, with regard to BushFRAUD administration policies and practices that led to detainee abuse.

Such an investigation/commission should issue arrest warrants, and have police powers to ensure true justice.

Making recommendations to ensure that the systematic abuses of the Bush administration are not repeated has already been done, see the Geneva Conventions (.)

In February 2011, Bush canceled a trip to Switzerland, where alleged victims of torture had intended to file a criminal complaint against him. An investigation implicating US officials in torture is under way in Spain. Documents made public by Wikileaks revealed that US pressure on Spanish authorities to drop the case has continued under the Obama administration.

Human Rights Watch said that the US government's failure to investigate US officials for the torture and ill-treatment of detainees undermines US efforts to press for accountability for human rights violations abroad.

"The US is right to call for justice when serious international crimes are committed in places like Darfur, Libya, and Sri Lanka, but there should be no double standards," Roth said. "When the US government shields its own officials from investigation and prosecution, it makes it easier for others to dismiss global efforts to bring violators of serious crimes to justice."

Getting Away with Torture

Summary

Recommendations

I. Background: Official Sanction for Crimes against Detainees

II. Torture of Detainees in US Counterterrorism Operations

III. Individual Criminal Responsibility

Appendix: Foreign State Proceedings Regarding US Detainee Mistreatment

Acknowledgments and Methodology

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References:

The Torture Report Diary

Getting Away With Torture Report

Inquiry Into 3 Deaths in CIA Custody Insufficient :o