After reading WaPo's series about the Vice President last week, the absurdity of the US’ failure to plan for security in our own nation while fanatically pursuing torture directives and the destruction of our justice system appears to indicate that the purpose of torture may be to shut mouths, not open them.
Start the analysis by seeing everything that has not happened in the interests of national security. An excellent diary by TeacherKen illustrates how our nation is virtually unprepared for any kind of domestic disaster. From the book The Edge of Disaster: Building a Resilient Nation:
It is illogical to invest so much in confronting the terrorist threat beyond our shores while being so parsimonious when it comes to protecting ourselves from acts of terror or catastrophic events here at home.
I urge everyone to read at least the diary because our nation is in absolute deep peril. By way of contrast, the diary perfectly illustrates how the executive office’s obsession with torturing people and transmogrifying our criminal justice system and doing all things overseas is truly absurd in the face of all that is decaying in our nation, the fact that commercial air traffic is not subject to anything near the level of scrutiny that passenger travel receives, and the nearly total inattention to our nation’s harbors and ports.
We Are Blinded By Hindsight.
Our leaders would probably claim that they chose to do or not do what they did following 9/11"based on intelligence received." It is high time we questioned relationships from which "intelligence" is received, because most likely it is mired in those treacheries known as black ops:
It's easy to see a public relations campaign behind the CIA's release of sensitive documents from the 1960s and 1970s exposing domestic spying, assassination attempts and more. CIA Director Michael Hayden said Tuesday's release was part of the agency's "social contract" with the American people and showed a determination to be "as open as possible."
Some critics of the agency see a more pernicious spin job. By releasing heavily redacted information on the unlawful operations of decades ago, they argue, the CIA is trying to distract attention from current controversies, including the agency's network of secret prisons.Regardless, the documents lead to one inescapable conclusion: The blame for the CIA's behavior lies less with the agency than with presidents of both parties who misused it to do their dirty work. Many of the documented abuses originated not at the CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters but at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
From the getgo national security directives seemed berserk post-9/11, in terms of what did or did not receive critical attention. To crib from my own comment elsewhere:
Something about everything post-9/11 stinks of some kind of black ops, because it seems our leaders knew too much.
For instance, why didn't W throw my pet goat into the great beyond and start shouting 'Houston, God help us if they hit Houston' or something like that? He should not have sat relaxed, as if knowing the full scope of the attack that day. No one among the rest of us knew the attack was finished for weeks.
Think about it: Houston is the one city in the US that could just shut us down if it were hit. All the oil is there, many surely have flown over it and seen all the tanks. Unlike most US cities which, if attacked, would not shut down the country, if Houston's oil supply were compromised, most activity in the US would scream to a stop. The tangible economy is held together by trucks. Stop the oil and the nation goes into crisis. Estimates are that food supplies would be extinguished in four days given cessation of trucking. But I defy anyone to demonstrate the administration taking meaningful, significant steps to guard Houston or any other port city since. Witness Katrina/Rita as to their concern for Houston.
How come these people didn't feel what I felt on September 11, 2001? I didn't know the attack was over that day. Or the next, or for that matter for months (remember Anthrax?).
Or how come they didn't declare nationwide martial law? Why by sundown were they acting as if there were no more known threat? Because I was driving the interstate that day, and was amazed that I could possibly cross the California state line, and only be asked if I was carrying fruit. Even then I felt somehow let down.
How did they know it was only an air strike, and just that day? Whatever you want to say, they made their defense choices around that. Not only did they pretty much ignore the harbors, they started selling the ports. Commercial flights still go unchecked - only our physical privacy is groped in transportation security. Containers fresh off foreign ships mostly get loaded onto trucks without inspection. What is the matter with this logistical picture?
LIHOP or whatever, it doesn't make a bit of difference. If they weren't privy to some black ops information before 9/11, then how did they relax about all of the above security concerns, and only clamp down on airports?
Because that is about all they ever have done. Remember the scene from F911, where the lone state trooper is left to defend the entire coast of Oregon?
If he didn't 'know too much,' how do you reconcile the following portrait of the Vice President with the urgency of the moment? From the first of the recent WaPo series:
In a bunker beneath the East Wing of the White House, Cheney locked his eyes on CNN, chin resting on interlaced fingers. He was about to watch, in real time, as thousands were killed on Sept. 11, 2001.
Previous accounts have described Cheney's adrenaline-charged evacuation to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center that morning, a Secret Service agent on each arm. They have not detailed his reaction, 22 minutes later, when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed."There was a groan in the room that I won't forget, ever," one witness said. "It seemed like one groan from everyone" -- among them Rice; her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley; economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey; counselor Matalin; Cheney's chief of staff, Libby; and the vice president's wife.
Cheney made no sound. "I remember turning my head and looking at the vice president, and his expression never changed," said the witness, reading from a notebook of observations written that day. Cheney closed his eyes against the image for one long, slow blink.
No, instead of concern about ports and commercial air traffic, for instance, we learn from the second WaPo article that he became fixated on the torture issue:
No longer was the vice president focused on procedural rights, such as access to lawyers and courts. The subject now was more elemental: How much suffering could U.S. personnel inflict on an enemy to make him talk? Cheney's lawyer feared that future prosecutors, with motives "difficult to predict," might bring criminal charges against interrogators or Bush administration officials.
Geneva rules forbade not only torture but also, in equally categorical terms, the use of "violence," "cruel treatment" or "humiliating and degrading treatment" against a detainee "at any time and in any place whatsoever." The War Crimes Act of 1996 made any grave breach of those restrictions a U.S. felony.
(...)
In a radio interview last fall, Cheney said, "We don't torture." What he did not acknowledge, according to Alberto J. Mora, who served then as the Bush-appointed Navy general counsel, was that the new legal framework was designed specifically to leave room for cruelty. In international law, Mora said, cruelty is defined as "the imposition of severe physical or mental pain or suffering." He added: "Torture is an extreme version of cruelty."
How extreme? Yoo was summoned again to the White House in the early spring of 2002. This time the question was urgent. The CIA had captured Abu Zubaida, then believed to be a top al-Qaeda operative, on March 28, 2002. Case officers wanted to know "what the legal limits of interrogation are," Yoo said.
This previously unreported meeting sheds light on the origins of one of the Bush administration's most controversial claims. The Justice Department delivered a classified opinion on Aug. 1, 2002, stating that the U.S. law against torture "prohibits only the worst forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" and therefore permits many others. Distributed under the signature of Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, the opinion also narrowed the definition of "torture" to mean only suffering "equivalent in intensity" to the pain of "organ failure ..... or even death."
The Vice President objected to detainees having lawyers, he railroaded through the military commissions legislation... all of the most terrifying possible actions against his accused. But instead of tightening port security, he started selling them off.
Focus back on what does not interest the Vice President... just how severe is our domestic defense decay? From this diary about the Coast Guard:
...the strength of this vital organization is breaking... Maintenance periods were being shortchanged in the more dependable Cutters to cover down time for the broken ones.(Ships in the Coast Guard are called Cutters) This culminated in more and more breakdowns fleet-wide. The last ship I was on had to patrol the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska for two months with only one engine because they didn't have the time and money to repair the other one. Crew performance began to drop off as moral deteriorated. I saw more drug related discharges in my last year of service than all of the previous nine combined. Speaking to some of my old friends who are still in, things have only gotten worse.
(...)
If these failures are not fixed quickly, I fear our Coast Guard will not be able to continue doing it's job of securing our thousands of miles of coastline and hundreds of ports and waterways. The men and women of the Coast Guard deserve better, and it is our obligation to keep them well equipped so they can answer the call when needed. That's what their motto "Semper Paratus" means. Always Ready.
And security of our ports regarding cargo containers? The issue was of scant concern until 2006 in the wake of governmental embarrassment following Dubai Ports’ attempted purchase of US ports:
Rep. Bobby Scott (D- 3rd District) says the failed Arab port deal controversy may prove to be a good thing because it has opened people's eyes to the issue of port security.
He got a close look at one of the Virginia Port Authority’s primary anti-terrorism weapons. The Vehicle and Cargo Inspection System, called VACIS, uses x-ray technology to view contents of cargo containers.
The problem is there aren’t enough of the $1 million devices, so inspectors can only look at about five percent of the nearly two million containers that pass through the port each year.
It is easy to tamper with seals and there is no inspection for radioactivity of containers although Hong Kong does. Last year's bill to increase port security requires
the nation's 22 largest ports, which handle 98 percent of all cargo entering the country, to install radiation detectors by the end of next year [2007].
Pilot programs would be established at three foreign ports to test technology for nonintrusive cargo inspections. Currently only one foreign port, Hong Kong, scans all U.S.-bound cargo for nuclear materials.
Port security? Who really knows?
Torture Will Bring Perpetual War
Why has the executive branch chosen to let our national security interests languish in preference to torturing people? Let me give the floor to LondonYank:
Old CIA hands like Bush 41 and Robert Gates had a problem in the early 1980s. Congress had outlawed CIA funded deathsquads, assassinations, false flag operations and other methods beloved of black ops specialists.
What to do? Go to your closest ally, Britain, whose like-minded leader, Thatcher, will help you set up an arrangement for plausible deniability. Go to your favorite like-minded Saudi intelligence thug Prince Bandar to act as procurement agent and bagman for the terrorist cells, assassinations, deathsquads, false flag operations and coups you want engineered.
Wrap the project up as the Al-Yamamah contract to sell jet fighters from near-bankrupt UK defense company BAe (formerly British Aerospace) to Saudi Arabia with kickbacks to accounts of Bandar for spending on black ops worldwide. Then give BAe lots of Pentagon contracts to fund the process.
Voila! You can start funding Saddam, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, the Nicaraguan Contras and other pet projects with no fingerprints!
We have heard the confessions and hand-wringing of the CIA lately, how they have admitted to a long, grimy history of black ops. I am guessing that they, like others, are anxious to distance themselves from the policies pursued by the executive branch. The Vice President's behavior perhaps embarasses them, and rightly so. We are not talking "conspiracy theory" here. The CIA are the ones who have put black ops on the front page. The WaPo's series of articles indicate that the Vice President's fingerprints are all over the long history of black ops. And 9/11 still stinks of some kind of tacit compromise, some kind of LIHOP intelligence failure.
How pervasive are black ops? Probably very pervasive. Wiki::
Black Ops missions often fall into the deniability category, where no government will claim responsibility for the action, or where responsibility is shifted to another actor in the case of a "false flag" operation. This type of operation is normally used by various secret services to achieve some goals while trying to operate secretly (so the connection between "black operations" and secret agents or even the country of their origin cannot be found). The methods used in black operations are also used in unconventional warfare and includes actions like assassinations, espionage, sabotages, and supporting of resistance movements.
We taxpayers have paid entire armies for decades on end:
The U.S. government is training soldiers in upwards of 70 countries at any given time. The most transparent, and consequently well known of these training programs is the Pentagon's International Military Education and Training Program (IMET). Recent graduates as well as soldiers soon to be trained by this program come from countries at war or with horrific human rights records, including Indonesia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Congo, and Cote d'Ivoire.
Of the active conflicts in 1999, the United States supplied arms or military technology to parties in more than 92% of them --39 out of 42. In over one-third of these conflicts - 18 out of 42 - the United States provided from 10% to 90% of the arms imported by one side of the dispute.
Examples of black ops "gone wrong" include US arming/training of both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The unbroken pattern here is that first the US hires, arms and trains leaders, then years later goes to (phenomenally expensive) war with them. What about the rest of the foreign men also armed and trained in these operations? Can the US account for which way they went when official US channels fired them, abruptly parted ways with them, or whatever the eventual relationship turned out to be? Specifically, did the men trained by the US in the middle east necessarily go with bin Laden or Hussein, or did they perhaps remain in the employ of the US under black ops? Or are they automatically 'enemies' because they have served the US under a false flag? We the public need to know more about the men who have made war for US interests under other flags.
Suppose you had trained under one of these armies, and that you are a leader for perhaps a few hundred people of your tribe in Iraq. You see Abu Ghraib's legacy, and hear about Guantanamo. Are you now going forth in trust to have peace talks with anyone from the US government? Are you not instead going to hide from US authorities as if your family's life depended on it? There will be no reconciliation with the very tribal people of the Iraq region, ever, as long as they are afraid of being tortured. Torture will shut them up and deny peace. Can this even be by accident on the part of the executive office? Did our executive families go into business in weapons manufacture to put themselves out of business? Are they not instead going to seek to perpetuate a market for their hateful products?
To doubters, explain why the bin Laden family (hundreds) were immediately flown out of the US. Someone, somewhere, seemed to have them well-prepared and alerted for exodus.
Probably plenty of the black ops people and other army trainees know things that would make many US leaders very uncomfortable if their secrets were to become broad public knowledge. I for one dearly want to hear what the Vice President’s accused prisoners in Guantanamo and elsewhere have to tell us in a public court of law. If he's deceitfully accusing and imprisoning his own hirelings to keep their mouths shut about whatever "work" they have done or war waged under false flags for US interests, we need to know. We know one thing: if the Vice President wants to shut mouths and intimidate foreign witnesses because of the US black ops history to which the CIA now abundantly confess, the hideous abuses at Abu Ghraib ought to do the trick.
I can not think of another reason why all our top executive brass have utterly ignored our true national security interests in preference to pursuing torture and kangaroo court "justice" except that to ensure silence and fear. I don't offer any theories here. But maybe it is high time we started to question just what they may not want us to hear from detainees at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the other "black" prisons, which testimony the military commissions would forever conceal from the public under the guise of "national security."
Their response to national threat has been to let all systems decay, yet they can‘t spend enough time on the issues of torture and military commissions (etc.). We must direct our attention to whatever fears or criminality founder their reasoning about our national priorities. Where black ops have tarnished our name, we need to answer to it as a people, not ignore it as some cabalistic secret within the defense department.
Famous Last Words
Kennedy said to his collaborator Clark Clifford (shortly after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion) that, "Something very bad is going on within the CIA and I want to know what it is. I want to shred the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the four winds."
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