intelligence Posts

Henry Jenkins (right) mixes up the names but has good commentary on the Susan Boyle phenomenon in How Sarah [Susan] Spread and What it Means. I've been quoting lines over on my Tumblr blog but this is a good one for Quaker readers because I think it says something about the Convergent Friends culture:

When we talk about pop cosmopolitanism, we are most often talking about American teens doing cosplay or listening to K-Pop albums, not church ladies gathering to pray for the success of a British reality television contestant, but it is all part of the same process. We are reaching across borders in search of content, zones which were used to organize the distribution of content in the Broadcast era, but which are much more fluid in an age of participatory culture and social networks.

We live in a world where content can be accessed quickly from any part of the world assuming it somehow reaches our radar and where the collective intelligence of the participatory culture can identify content and spread the word rapidly when needed. Susan Boyle in that sense is a sign of bigger things to come -- content which wasn't designed for our market, content which wasn't timed for such rapid global circulation, gaining much greater visibility than ever before and networks and production companies having trouble keeping up with the rapidly escalating demand.

Susan Boyle's video was produced for a U.K.-only show but social media has allowed us to share it across that border. In the Convergent Friends movement, we're discovering "content which wasn't designed for our market"--Friends of all different stripes having direct access to the work and thoughts of other types of Friends, which we are able to sort through and spread almost immediately. In this context, the "networks and productions companies" would be our yearly meetings and larger Friends bodies.

Reports are in that link up the US torture program and the hunt for the non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Jonathan S Landay in McClatchy News quotes a "former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue":

"The main [reason for the torture] is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.

All this is not really a surprise; I covered it in real time over on Nonviolence.org. There were numerous reports that the Vice President and Secretary of Defense were pushing the intelligence agencies to come up with evidence that would back their flawed theories.

The United States is supposed to be the champion of freedom but we resorted to the most brutal of communist-era torture techniques because our highest officials were more interested in their cartoon view of the world than the complex reality (and not so complex: anyone who's taken an "Intro to Islam" class would know that an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden would be have been very unlikely). When facts and ideological theories don't match up, it's time to dig for more facts and revisit the ideologies. 

Part of the playbook for American torture in Iraq and Guantánamo comes from Chinese interrogation methods used against captured Americans during the Cold War.

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

It sounds like something out of the 1962 thriller film The Manchurian Candidate. And in a way it is: the idea that Chinese Communists had used inhuman ruthlessness to unlock the secrets of the brain to create the perfect truth technique would be a charming artifact of 1950s American culture, something to show alongside the hula hoop and the Jetson-like hover cars we're all supposed to be driving in the year 2000. Instead it's yet another exhibit in Pentagon amnesia.

Doesn't anyone do any fact checking at the Pentagon? "Officials who drew on the SERE program [in 2002 to design American intelligence adaptation] appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners." And yet... it's clear that Presidents Bush and Cheney wanted false information in 2002 to launch the war against Iraq. Whatever "confessions" can be wrung from the Baghdad taxi drivers who got caught up in the arrest sweeps can certainly be used to bully the growing number who oppose the war.

But what do we want, justifications or the truth? Peace in the region or protection from sins of the past? Forget that torture is inhuman: it's also just an unreliable way of getting accurate information. It's hard to imagine a realistic scenario where the horrible events of 9/11 could have been stopped by acts of torture by U.S. intelligence or military personnel but it's could have been stopped if thoughtful analysts had been allowed to share information across agency lines and been focused on true knowledge and understanding.

The latest in the growing scandal of the CIA's destroyed torture tapes comes from the US Justice Department:

The department is taking an even harder line with other Congressional committees looking into the matter, and is refusing to provide information about any role it might have played in the destruction of the videotapes.

The Times article goes on to explain that scheduled grilling of CIA officials by the House Intelligence Committee will almost definitely be postponed because of the Justice Department's obstruction.

2002: the CIA tortures prisoners and films the proceedings;
2005: the CIA destroys the evidence because it would implicate those agents who conducted torture;
2007: the Justice Department tries to shut down Congressional investigations into the tapes' destruction.

Thankfully Congressional leaders don't seem to be standing down in the wake of the Justice Department bullying, with both Democrats and Republicans vowing to press on. From the Washington Post: "Congressional leaders from both parties alleged that Justice is trying to block their investigation and vowed to press ahead with hearings." Will Congress finally start demanding accountability for how American intelligence forces have been acting since 2001? Well, don't hold your breath. Still we might all be in store for some interesting revelations over the next couple of weeks.

More from the U.S. War of Terror. Two years ago officials of the Central Intelligence Agency purposefully destroyed taped evidence of its torture program.

They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

The CIA guys were put in a difficult position: more or less ordered by their President to torture prisoners suspected of belonging to al Qaeda in an moment of history--the tapes were made in 2002--when many Americans were willing to look the other way. But it should go without saying that torture is never okay, never justified. Many studies have proven it generally doesn't provide reliable information as the victim says whatever they think their captor wants to hear just to end the pain. How many court cases against real al Qaeda agents are going to have to be thrown out now that we know the evidence is a product of abuse?

There are times when men and women of honor have to say no to their superiors, no to their President and no to the American people, when they must draw a line in the sand for the sake of decency and humanity. That would have been hard enough in 2002. But to destroy the evidence is 2005 is pure obstruction of justice. The CIA is hiding the acts it performed in our name from us. Everyone involved in the cover-up and destruction belongs in jail. Let's hope for democracy's sake that they end up there.

Fascinating details coming out about the new U.S intelligence estimate on Iran. It was released two days after a major meeting of world powers in Paris, a meeting where sanctions and Iran were discussed. So what's with the timing? Did Condoleeza just not get it back from Kinkos in time? If you're about to release a major report that will reshape half a decade of U.S.-Iranian relations, maybe you whip up a quick power point presentation for the weekend powwow in Paris?

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is touting this as a victory for his country: "This is a declaration of victory for the Iranian nation against the world powers over the nuclear issue." I'm not sure it's exactly a victory but it is a confirmation of what he's been claiming for years: Iran is not building a bomb. The victory is in the Bush Administration implicit acknowledgment that it's not always right. Of course Bush is not the kind of guy who can really ever admit he's wrong and he's still throwing snipes out: Condi "told reporters in the Ethiopian capital Wednesday that the U.S. intelligence report's public release showed the Bush administration was committed to transparent democracy while Iran was not."

Now I actually agree that we can't downplay Iran. The country doesn't have the kind of openness and democracy that should be a basic human right. If it could get the bomb, I'm sure it would. What major regional power wouldn't want it? With all the internationally bullying going around it's not a bad thing to have in your back pocket.  President Bush declared a de facto Cold War against Iraq in his 2002 State of Union "Axis of Evil" speech.

But one thing about Iran is that it's Iraq twenty years later. If Iran's civic structure is broken, then the West is largely to blame. The British and Soviets invaded Iran in 1941 to secure oil supplies and it was they who put in power Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran. When Pahlavi lost power in the early 1950s, the U.S. Central Intelligence agency led a covert operation called Operation Ajax to put him back in power (the project was led by Kermit Roosevelt Jr., Teddy's grandson). In 1969 the so-called Nixon Doctrine formalized the Shah's Iran as a key American ally. The Iranian Revolution changed all this and along with the brutal Iran-Iraq War created the Iran we know today.

It's easy to forget that we've long supported dictators who promised us a steady supply of oil. Saddam Hussein was our buddy until he threatened Kuwaiti oil fields. If the United States had spent the last thirty years working on building strong democracies in the Middle East then both Iraq and Iran would most likely be peaceful, strong nations without any great strong incentive to put in the massive investment needed to develop weapons of mass destruction. Might oil cost a few dollars more a barrel? Sure. But isn't that worth the thousands of American, Iraqi and Iranian lives that have been destroyed in twenty years of near-constant warfare? 

In a stunning turnaround, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Iran has not been trying to build atomic weapons since 2003:

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

First thoughts: what would the world be like if we had seen a statement like this regarding Iraq in early 2003? We know now that Saddam Hussein had long since abandoned nuclear aspirations and that his military infrastructure was so weakened by years of embargoes that it was a threat to no one. A number of us challenged the Bush Administration's experts, pointing to the weaknesses in the evidence publicly presented. It's hard to hide a major weapons program or a major alliance like the Saddam-Al Qaeda partnership. If these had been real we would have had more convincing evidence.

Sanctions and international pressure successfully stopped Saddam Hussein's ambitions against Iraq's neighbors. If the world had just waited him out, he might have eventually been deposed or even come around--who would have thought that Libya's Muammar al-Gaddafi would still be around in 2007 and that the U.S. would have full diplomatic relations with him!

Second thoughts: we've been rattling the sabers of war for four years? What if Bush had actually started a war with Iran?

Third thoughts: all indications were that the U.S. intelligence agencies have been under intense pressures to deliver assessments that fit with Administration policy: Bush wants to fight Saddam and the CIA gives him lame reasons that Congress is too weak to challenge. Does today's turnaround signal the waning of the Bush powers in these last years of his Presidency so that the National Intelligence Estimate is finally credible? Or has the White House decided it doesn't want to continue threatening war? The conspiracy-minded will note that the Iowa Caucus is exactly a month away and will ask which Republican candidate stands to gain from a stand-down with Iran.

Finally, for now, the fourth thought: Iran has had a vested interest in looking tough. What will happen there now? Fortunately this latest report paints an Iranian leadership that's rational, saying that its "decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs." Iran is still a dangerous country (as is the U.S.) so what happens now?