Michael Collins: An Interview with Vincent Bugliosi Part 1

By Michael Collins

Michael Collins: An Interview with Vincent Bugliosi - Part 1

Prosecuting George W. Bush for Murder

"Plotting the crime, Bush plans the misleading 2003 State of the Union speech then delivers the lies to citizens and the Congress: "A brutal dictator, -- with ties to
terrorism -- will not be permitted to dominate a vital region and threaten the
United States."

~ George W. Bush

Michael Collins
Washington, DC

In his new book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, Vincent Bugliosi makes a devastating, well documented case that President George W. Bush is guilty of murder as a result of the lies he told to justify the invasion of Iraq.

As a Los Angeles prosecutor, Bugliosi represented the state in 105 major cases and won 104, including each of his 21 murder cases. Since his first book, Helter Skelter, he's been one of the top true crime writers with three number one best sellers and numerous awards.

In his best known case, Bugliosi convicted Charles Manson of murder even though Manson was never at two of the crime scenes when the victims were murdered. While he has not been on hand for any combat, should Bush appears before a judge and jury charged with the murder of U.S. soldiers, Bugliosi is confident that he's provided the arguments and evidence required for a first degree murder conviction.

Bugliosi's argument is simple. Bush wanted a war with Iraq. He had to show that a preemptive invasion of Iraq was justified. To do this Iraq had to be an imminent threat to the United States. There were two major problems. Bush couldn't prove any connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. More importantly, his own intelligence estimate found that the only scenario in which Saddam posed an imminent threat to the United States was through a preemptive attack on Iraq that threatened Saddam's survival, i.e., the Bush proposal.

That was a minor obstacle. Bush cheated. He simply reversed the findings of the National Intelligence Estimate (NEI) of 2002, classified the original document, and provided Congress with a doctored version to support his claims. By doing this, Bush pushed through an illegal invasion which he had to have known would cost U.S. lives. That, Bugliosi argues, is an act of murder committed against each and every U.S. soldier killed in the war.

I interviewed Vincent Bugliosi on Sunday, August 3, 2008 for 90 minutes. He was gracious and generous with his time. Totally focused on this project, he is working seven days a week to spread the word and find at least one prosecutor to take the case for the prosecution of George W. Bush.

INTERVIEW Part 1

"Apparently its okay for George Bush to take this nation to war on a lie, to be responsible, criminally responsible for well over 100,000 deaths, but it's not okay to prosecute him. Not only isn't it okay to prosecute him, it isn't even okay to talk about prosecuting him. This is unbelievable what's going on in this country. How can we have a country where they permit a president to do what he did and they do absolutely nothing to him except to try to protect him?"

~ Vincent Bugliosi

Forbidden images: the direct result of the lies leading to war Image cc

Interview with Vincent Bugliosi
Conducted by Michael Collins
August 3, 2008

Michael Collins (MC): You recently published The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. This is a deadly serious charge from a distinguished prosecutor. What's the core of your case, the essence of it?

Vincent Bugliosi (VB): The essence of the case against George Bush is that he deliberately took this nation to war in Iraq on a lie, under false pretenses, and therefore, under the law, he is guilty of murder for the deaths of over 4,000 young American soldiers who have died so far in Iraq fighting his war --not your war or my war or America's war, but George Bush's war.

I can tell you that if the case went to trial, the central, overriding issue at Bush's trial, would be whether or not he took this nation to war in self‑defense as he claimed he did: that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and therefore he was an imminent threat to the security of this country, so we had to strike first in self‑defense.

If Bush could prove this -- he doesn't have the burden of proving it, by the way, but he certainly would assume that burden -- that would be his defense. The prosecution has the burden of showing that he did not act in self‑defense. But if the evidence showed that he did act in self defense, that would be a legal justification for all of the deaths during the war in Iraq.

If the prosecutor, on the other hand, could prove that he did not act in self‑defense and he took the nation to war under false pretenses, then all of the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq would become unlawful killings. All of those killings would become unlawful killings and therefore murder.

I spent a great amount of time at the L.A. County Law Library and the Ninth Circuit Library here in L.A. working on the issue of jurisdiction, because I realize that even if someone is guilty of murder, if you don't have jurisdiction to prosecute them, you don't have a case, really. I was unable to establish jurisdiction for the over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, children and babies who have died so far in Bush's war. He is guilty of those murders, but I could not establish jurisdiction against him for those murders. But I definitely established jurisdiction on a federal, state and local level to prosecute Bush for the murders of the 4,000 young American soldiers that have died so far in Iraq.

MC: You outlined some very specific events that happened in October 2002 and discrete pieces of evidence, one concerning the weapons of mass destruction. Can you just describe those and explain why they're so central?

VB: As I testified before Congress, I have documentary evidence that when George Bush told the nation on the evening of October 7, 2002, that Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country, he was telling millions of unsuspecting Americans the exact opposite of what his own CIA had told him just six days earlier in a classified report on October 1 -- that Hussein was not an imminent threat. That classified report was the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002. But it even gets worse than this. On October 4, three days after the October 1 classified report, the Bush administration put out an unclassified summary version of the classified report so they could give it to Congress and the American people. This unclassified version came to be known as the White Paper, and in this White Paper the conclusion of U.S. intelligence that Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country was completely deleted.

Every single one of these all‑important words was deleted from the White Paper, so Congress and the American people never saw any of this, and I don't know how things can get too much worse than what I've just told you.

It was because of what I just told you that I got a call on the morning of June 16 here in Los Angeles at my home from a very conservative Republican Southern congressman who voted for the war. He was one of the most outspoken supporters of the war. He told me this. "Bugliosi," he said, "I heard your book on tape, and I'm now convinced that George Bush deceived Congress," or "misled Congress," I think was his word, "misled Congress into war." And he said, "I've already bought several copies of your book, and I've passed them out to colleagues, and I told them, ‘Read the book. We've been lied to.'"

What was he was talking about? He saw that the White Paper did not contain the most important conclusion of all in the classified document, that Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country. He also learned that the classified document stated many of its conclusions, not the one I just told you, but many of the conclusions in the area of weapons of mass destruction as opinions, using words like "we assess that" or "we judge that Hussein had," let's say, biological weapons. The White Paper that this congressman was given, those words of qualification were completely deleted and it read, "Hussein has biological weapons." He also learned that there were several important dissents from U.S. intelligence agencies with respect to nuclear weapons in the classified report. But in the White Paper that he was given, all of those dissents were deleted.

This is just -- you know, I hate to use the word terrible over again, but it's just absolutely terrible, and the question is how evil, how criminal, how perverse, how sick can George Bush and his people be? And yet they got away with all of this. As I'm talking to you right now, there are well over 100,000 people -- some estimates go in excess of a million -- well over 100,000 precious human beings who are in their cold graves right now because of it. But so far, George Bush has gotten away with murder and we, the American people, cannot let him do this. He's gotten away with murder, and no one is doing anything.

MC: What are the members of the mainstream media and the upper tiers of power doing to bring Bush to justice?

What they are doing -- they are doing something. They're trying to protect him. They're actively trying to protect this guy. Why would they want to protect this monstrous individual who took this nation to war on a lie with the incalculable horror and suffering and sea of blood and screams and mutilations and beheadings he has caused? Why would they want to protect him? They had no hesitancy in going after Clinton for doing absolutely nothing. Clinton has consensual sexual activity outside of marriage, lies under oath to cover it up.

No self‑respecting prosecutor would ever dream of going after Clinton for this. So he did absolutely nothing, and yet, as I've pointed out many times, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, Clinton was savaged by the mainstream media, including the so‑called liberal New York Times and Washington Post. He was impeached by this monstrous, grotesque, obscene Ken Starr. The federal government funded a seven‑year, $70 million effort by Starr to destroy the Clinton presidency. They wanted to hang him in the town square at noontime. No one wanted to protect him. But they want to protect this morally defective, amoral, terrible, despicable human being, George Bush. I have nothing but contempt for George Bush, and yet the mainstream media is out there trying to protect him. I'm not saying there's any conspiracy involved here by the mainstream media to keep me off all these shows. It's just that each member of the mainstream national media feels the same way about it.

MC: Right.

VB: They do not want me talking on national television about prosecuting George Bush for murder. So apparently its okay for George Bush to take this nation to war on a lie, be responsible, criminally responsible for well over 100,000 deaths, its okay for him to do that, but it's not okay to prosecute him. Not only isn't it okay to prosecute him, it isn't even okay to talk about prosecuting him. This is unbelievable what's going on in this country. How can we have a country where they permit a president to do what he did and they do absolutely nothing to him except to try to protect him? I don't understand that. Where am I missing something?

I was telling my wife a couple of days ago, I said, "You've heard about these cold case files," and she said, "Of course." And they even have a TV series, I guess, on it. But I've known about them for years down at the DA's office. Very commonly you'll have just one victim of a murder, just one victim, and you'll have a detective assigned to the case pursuing the killer for 10, 15, 20, 25 years, and then after he retires, some other detective takes over. Some of these cases go on for 30, 35, 40 years. The Black Dahlia case in Los Angeles, I think, goes back in the ‘30s. They're still investigating it 75 years later. And frequently we read in the newspaper that the killer is found back East. He's living under an assumed name and he's brought back to Los Angeles and he's prosecuted. Just one victim and you have this detective tenaciously and endlessly pursuing this case.

So I said to her, "There may be as many as one million victims, not one victim, but one million victims in their cold graves right now decomposing as a result of George Bush's monumental crime." And I said to her -- "What person in authority on the face of this globe is representing these one million people in their graves, fighting to bring about justice for them, pursuing the person, the guilty person who put them there?" And she said, "You." And I said, "No, you didn't hear what I said. I said what person in authority is going after the killer of these million people?" I said, "I don't have the authority of an emaciated moth. I don't have any authority."

I'm searching for someone who does have authority to bring George Bush to justice. I want to find that one courageous prosecutor out there, whether he's in Fargo, North Dakota, or Tampa, Florida, who will bring George Bush to justice.

But when you juxtapose the one victim, maybe she's found lying in a pool of blood in her kitchen in L.A. 30 years ago, and you have this detective for 30 years trying to bring about justice for that murder, and then you have a million people dying over there, and there's no one presently that I know of on the face of this globe who's fighting to bring about justice for these people in their graves, and it's mind‑boggling to me. Am I missing something here?

MC: Does Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) support your efforts? (Conyers is Chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary where Mr. Bugliosi gave testimony on July 25, 2008 in hearings on the Kucinich impeachment resolution).

VB: All I know is that he called me and he said he's reading the book and he likes it very much. I got the definite sense that he was supportive of what I'm trying to do. And, as you know, when I testified before Congress, I think it came across in body language and many other ways that he was on my side.

MC: When he held up your book?

House Committee on the Judiciary Chairman holds up Vincent Bugliosi's book prior to testimony by the former prosecutor. Bugliosi was barred from specifically naming the president by the rules of Congress. This is the only Judiciary or other congressional hearing during which a sitting president has been accused of murder. (Video)

VB: He held up the book, and when they wanted to shut me down once or twice, he prevented that. I can tell you (that) he did not specifically say to me, "I agree that he should -- Bush should be prosecuted for murder, and I hope he is prosecuted for murder." He didn't use those words. But the definite implication was that he was very supportive of what I'm doing in the book and he liked the book, but he did not take that additional step.

Now, I'll tell you who did take that additional step, the congressman, the congressman from -- I don't want to mention the state, but a congressman in the South. He said, "Mr. Bugliosi, come November I'm going to be out in the public with you, and I want to be at your side when George Bush, hopefully, is indicted for first degree murder." Now, here's something else when I'm talking about these million people out there.

MC: (On the absence of mainstream support to bring Bush to justice.)

Here's another incredible statistic. I'm trying to bring about justice for those people in their graves. I have no authority to do that, but I'm a private citizen trying to do that. What other person who's a member of the mainstream (is supporting this effort) -- I'm not talking about progressive radio, because they're just as much -- well, they're better Americans than the right wing, but they're not mainstream. They're supporting me. But what person, what other person in this entire country who's in the mainstream -- politicians, prosecutors, the national media, celebrities, many of whom hate George Bush and believe he took this nation to war on a lie -- who has come forward from the mainstream to say, "I support Vince Bugliosi"? You know what the answer is? I think it's zero.

Only one person who's a member of the mainstream has come forward, but not publicly, and said, "I support you, and I want Bush to be prosecuted for first degree murder." That's the congressman from the South, but he hasn't gone public.

MC: Right.

VB: But when we remove him, is there one other person -

MC: You have not received one other endorsement?

VB: I can't think of it. I've got -- progressive radio.

MC: Well, sure.

VB: But what I'm thinking of is, you know, a prominent celebrity or a prosecutor. Or someone at the network or cable or someone at a daily newspaper. I'm talking about a main newspaper, not a small paper or a review of the book. No one that I know of. And that came to my mind just last night, kind of an extension of the cold case thing, and I said to my wife, "Is there someone out there that I don't know about that's come forward?" There's got to be someone out there in this country that's got the courage to say, "Bugliosi is right, and I endorse what he's doing." And if there is that person, I really don't know who that person is. There's only one person who's a member of the mainstream who has come forward to support me, and that hasn't been publicly. I'm talking about the congressman. He's making no secret of it on Capitol Hill. He carries the book around with him. He's been passing the book out. He's contacted several people in the media, high up in the media, and asked them to interview me. I've spoken to one of them already, very high up, establishment media. He's working behind the scenes big‑time, but I think he's coming up for reelection. But he is the only person that comes to my mind in this entire country.

MC: That's stunning.

VB: And the majority of the American people, a poll showed, believe that Bush intentionally misled this country into war. Where is the outrage? Doesn't anyone have the courage to stand up and say, "I support Vince Bugliosi"? So far it's zero, and that just came to my mind last night.

People are always saying how courageous I am, and I'm not courageous. When I tell people, "No, it's all out of anger," they say, "Well, yeah, a lot of people are angry, but they don't have the courage to do anything about it." And I started to think about that, and as applied to me I think this: I have had fears, in taking on the U.S. Supreme Court, taking on the President of the United States, but my anger overcomes that fear. Do you follow?

Continued in Part 2

END

The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder by Vincent Bugliosi Vanguard Press

Permission to reproduce this material in part or whole with attribution of authorship, a link to this article, acknowledgement of images, and faithful representation of Mr. Bugliosi's remarks.

Authors Website: http://electionfraudnews.com

Authors Bio: Michael Collins is a writer who focuses on clean elections and voting rights. See this summary of his articles plus Election 2004: The Urban Legend and groundbreaking research and commentary in "" His web site, Election Fraud News & The Money Party, offers a collection of resources and commentary on critical issues facing the country.

Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg: Bush Likely to Attack Iran, Impeachment a Must By Sari Gelzer

Posted on February 14, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Dandelion Salad

By Sari Gelzer
TruthOut.org
February 7, 2008

The American public and media have not picked up on the urgency surrounding a pending war with Iran.
Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps the country’s most famous whistleblower, fears that before the Bush administration leaves office, it will try to attack Iran.

Indeed, Ellsberg’s argument gained merit as George W. Bush increased his rhetoric against Iran when he delivered his final State of the Union Address. Bush accused Iran of training militia extremists in Iraq and emphasized the United States will confront its enemies.

In a wide-ranging interview with Truthout, Ellsberg uses insight from his experience as a Pentagon analyst under the Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon administrations to discuss Bush’s plans to begin a war with Iran, the role of the press to give whistleblowers exposure and how American democracy can be restored.

Due to Ellsberg’s experience working within the government, I wanted his insight into how the Bush administration is attempting to begin a war with Iran.

When I highlighted his experience working for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1965 to draft a speech with the goal of rationalizing and gaining public support for the Vietnam War, Ellsberg gave a very long sigh.

“That was not my finest hour that I look back on. That was something that I am ashamed of,” he tells me with a heavy heart.

Ellsberg wishes he had spoken out against the Vietnam War sooner. As a civilian working for the government, he says his oath was always to the Constitution, and he violated that oath until the day he decided to leak the Pentagon Papers in 1971 to reveal the war was unlawful.

Ellsberg now spends his time ardently encouraging and supporting whistleblowers to come forward when they see constitutional violations. He emphasizes the importance of documents as evidence and of timeliness so that lies are exposed before an actual war occurs.

Pending war with Iran or Gulf of Tonkin deja vu

The recent announcement in December by the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) revealed, counter to the president’s claims, that Iran did not have an active nuclear program. This was unexpected, says Ellsberg.

The administration had said, weeks before this release, it had no intention of putting out NIE summaries, Ellsberg says. However, the information was released because, according to newspaper reports, there was a threat of leaks:

“As one news story put it, intelligence officials were lined up to go to jail if the administration did not release those findings,” says Ellsberg, emphasizing his creed in the need to take risks for the sake of revealing truth.

“I wish I could say it made an attack on Iran zero, and it hasn’t, but it has reduced it and confirms, in my opinion, the power of being willing to risk prosecution, willing to give up your career, your clearance, which these people would have done if they’d put that information out — and the mere threat was enough to get it out in this case,” emphasizes Ellsberg.

Ellsberg says Bush will simply find a different pretext from the nuclear program.

“After all, it was about a year ago that he really stopped pressing the nuclear program as the main reason to start attacking Iran and start talking about what they were doing against U.S. forces in Iraq,” says Ellsberg, who claims people in the military have recently undercut this statement by saying there is no evidence of Iran’s involvement against U.S. forces in Iraq.

Bush could also use an incident that is blamed on Iran as a means to begin a war with them.

Early this year, Ellsberg experienced deja vu when the White House and a complicit media portrayed an incident in the Strait of Hormuz that deeply paralleled the Tonkin Gulf incident of 1964.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident was an alleged attack by North Vietnamese ships upon American boats. As a result of this alleged aggression, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave former President Johnson the permission to expand the Vietnam War.

The recent incident involving Iran alleged serious threats were being made to U.S. ships by Iranian speedboats. Within days of the events in the Straight of Hormuz, information revealed the details of the entire event had been fabricated. Ellsberg sees promise in the quickness of this revelation because, in contrast, it was only in 2005 and 2008 that the inaccuracies and deceptions of the Gulf of Tonkin incident were revealed by the declassification of National Security Administration reports.

Ellsberg is worried Congress has not put forth an effort to demand it be informed before an attack on Iran should occur. Currently, there is a Senate resolution to demand Congress be consulted in the event of plans to attack Iran, but it has not gotten out of committee.

Instead, the Senate has virtually endorsed the president’s power to begin a war with Iran, says Ellsberg, with the passage of legislation last September declaring that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is a terrorist organization.

“To say that the Revolutionary Guards in Iran are a terrorist organization … is very close to saying that the president is able to attack them at his discretion. Now to give this president that discretion is inexcusable, outrageous,” says Ellsberg.

The Democratic Congress should be having open hearings on Iran, says Ellsberg, as well as on how we got into the war against Iraq and regarding Guantanamo. But the Democratic chairmen are not holding such hearings.

The American public, and media in general, have not picked up on the urgency surrounding a pending war with Iran, Ellsberg says. For over two years, Sy Hersh and others have been writing detailed articles stating operational plans against Iran are being updated to the minute, so that within hours or a day they can be implemented.

The problem with these articles, says Ellsberg, is not that Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, lacks credibility, it’s that his sources are not willing to go beyond their anonymity. Ellsberg emphasizes the sources in Sy Hersh’s reports, and others within the government, must reveal documents, risk their career and testify before Congress if they wish to profoundly alter the course of a pending war with Iran.

Gateway for whistleblowers: the press

Whistleblowers depend strongly on the press to relay their information to the American public, who will then be able to exert pressure in politics. When I ask Ellsberg if he believes the press is doing a good job of this, he gives me the most matter-of-fact answer of the evening: “No.”

In October of 2004, whistleblowers gave the New York Times knowledge of an illegal and unconstitutional domestic spying program that was being carried out by the U.S. government. The newspaper waited a year to reveal this information.

This was not just any year, says Ellsberg. The Times held this information at the request of the White House until after the 2004 election, avoiding the possible impact it could have had in swaying voters.

The New York Times, says Ellsberg, was pressured to publish the article because its internal reporter, James Risen, was going to release a book regarding the Times‘ decision to remain silent at the White House’s request.

The New York Times received a Pulitzer Prize for releasing this story. Ellsberg says he believes not only reporters but whistleblowers who reveal important information should also receive a prize in recognition of their public service. This is not a retroactive attempt on his part, he says, to receive an award.

Ellsberg smiles. “In my case my prize was the indictment,” which he says he has taken to be as great an honor as he needs in life.

The press in America, says Ellsberg, is currently avoiding the story of an explosive whistleblower by the name of Sibel Edmonds. A former FBI translator of Turkish and Persian, he says she has been attempting to speak before Congress for five years.

Early last month, Sibel Edmonds appeared on the front page of the London Sunday Times to reveal information she learned as an FBI employee. Ellsberg describes her claims that the U.S. government is giving nuclear materials, equipment and expertise to countries, including Turkey, which in turn sell them to other countries, including Pakistan. In effect, says Ellsberg, criminal bribery is occurring.

Ellsberg says Edmonds is also revealing the U.S. government is allowing a drug trade that finances terrorist operations, such as al-Qaeda, to continue. Ellsberg describes her revelations further, saying the U.S. government is turning a blind eye to the drug trade of U.S. allies such as Turkey and Pakistan, as well as countries such as Uzbekistan, where the United States wants to gain military base rights.

These allegations are only part of the knowledge Edmonds wishes to share before Congress, and she awaits the chance to do so, claiming she knows people in the FBI, CIA and NSA who will corroborate her statements, says Ellsberg.

This is in direct parallel, says Ellsberg, to what happened to Catherine Gunn, a British whistleblower whose actions, he believes, were more important than the release of the Pentagon Papers, because she provided information early enough to have prevented the Iraq war.

Gunn, who worked as an employee for British Intelligence, Government Communication Headquarters, revealed a document showing the United States was “tapping the U.N. Security Council members in order to influence their votes in support of an aggressive war, which was about to take place,” says Ellsberg.

This was front-page news, not only in London, says Ellsberg, but all over the world, except the United States, where it did not appear for about 11 months. Ellsberg says it was reasonable to believe Gunn could have stopped the war, and he believes she prevented a U.N. Security Council vote in support of the war.

“The same thing is happening to Sibel Edmonds as we speak,” says Ellsberg, intensely.

How to restore American democracy

As the days of Bush’s final term in office dwindle, Ellsberg emphasizes that, no matter how much time is left, impeachment is one thing that must happen for the sake of preserving American democracy.

Impeachment proceedings are essential, says Ellsberg, “both for the information that it will produce and above all to make it clear that Congress perceives the illegal and unconstitutional acts taken by this administration to be high crimes and misdemeanors, and for the deterrent effect that they will have on future presidents.”

In addition to impeachment hearings, Ellsberg says Congress must reverse the laws that have “outrageously” passed under “intimidation” by Bush. These include say Ellsberg: “The Patriot Act; the Military Commissions Act, which among other things essentially denies habeas corpus; the signing statements, which essentially give the president the power to ignore constraints on torture; and they could change the so-called Protect America Act which legalized much of the unconstitutional surveillance that the NSA was doing without Congress even knowing what they were legalizing.”

For those things that Congress cannot overturn, Ellsberg suggests hearings by Congress to show, for example, that “not only was torture illegal, it should continue to be illegal because it hurts our national security.”

None of these changes will happen without an active American movement, says Ellsberg, which must demand Congress members uphold their oath to support the Constitution rather than their political career.

Looking at the current primaries and the future presidential election, Ellsberg says the American public must create priorities that are different from those offered by the current candidates.

The changes that need to occur are drastic, and given the stakes, Ellsberg believes the American public should be willing to invest its time so that the crisis we currently find ourselves in can be met with strong action:

“If enough people simply look clearly at what we are doing in our course towards an abyss right now, they do have the power with the remaining democracy we have still in this country to turn it around.”

h/t: CURRENT EVENTS BLOG: Society, Media, & Justice
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see

How The Pentagon Planted a False Hormuz Story by Gareth Porter

Is Bush preparing the world for another USS Liberty? by Trevor Murphy

The American Media’s Complicit Failure to Investigate & Report on the Sibel Edmonds Case By Daniel Ellsberg

A Pre-election Attack on Iran Remains a Possibility By Leon Hadar

Interview: Seymour Hersh By Sarah Brown

A Strike in the Dark - What did Israel bomb in Syria? by Seymour M. Hersh

Seymour Hersh: What did Israel bomb in Syria? (video)

ANALYSIS: Iran laughing at U.S. lack of nuclear intelligence

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Reuters)

Last update - 22:03 10/12/2007

ANALYSIS: Iran laughing at U.S. lack of nuclear intelligence

By Amir Oren, Haaretz Correspondent

The noise that was heard last night in Tehran, according to credible reports, was a hearty Persian laugh after looking at the U.S. intelligence service's website. The unclassified document that Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Mike McConnell published, titled "Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities," as a laundered version that faithfully represents the greatest secrets collected by the CIA and the other U.S. intelligence services, can appropriately be called "much evaluation on no intelligence." The document's eight pages, which include embarrassing instructions on how to differentiate between different yet related terms ("it is possible," "it may be so," "one must not remove from the equation," and "it's reasonable to assume"), enable the Ayatollas' nuclear and operations officials and the heads of the Revolutionary Guards to reach this soothing conclusion - from their point of view: The Americans have no understanding of what is really happening in Iran's nuclear program. They have no solid information, they have no high-level agents and they have nothing more than a mix of guesswork and chatter. The dissemblance and concealment have succeeded, and the real dispute is not between Washington and Tehran, but within the U.S. administration itself. Only five weeks ago, McConnell announced that as a rule, he doesn?t believe in the release of such documents. He regretted the publication of the principles of the intelligence evaluation on Iraq. McConnel kept quiet on Monday. Donald Kerr, his deputy, was enlisted to explain why the Iran assessment followed in Iraq's footsteps. The essence of his explanation: The worst-case evaluation which has been repeatedly published since 2005 has changed, and it is important to clarify its "proper presentation." He means to say that if the politicians, President George W. Bush and Deputy President Richard Cheney, insist on leading their country into a war with Iran, this is their democratic right - on the assumption they receive Congressional support - but they shouldn't delude themselves that they can do this on the back of the CIA's investigative officers. Iraq won't repeat itself. On one level, this is a philosophical debate: How should the lack of "indicative signs" be interpreted, in the face of a devious enemy, a certified cheat who is determined in his pursuit of the goal (also according to the intelligence assessors). The suspicious Bush and Cheney believe the absence of evidence is in fact evidence of the existence of an additional, hidden channel of nuclear development. Their intelligence services say that without proof there is no place for such an evaluation. Responsibility is different for each rank. Intelligence is responsible for making assessments on facts collected, and the diplomats are responsible for preventing a failure at the two extremes: Not in making an over-estimation such as with Iraq (a result of former President Saddam Hussein's deception) and not in making an under-assessment such as with Al-Qaida before September 11, 2001. It is possible to say, using an Israeli parallel, like July 11, 2006, when the Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence did not know - or did not understand what it had heard - that Hezbollah would execute a kidnapping operation on the following day. On a second level, the debate is a professional one: How does one evaluate developments in the nuclear field, when there are no actual objects which can be felt (missiles or bombs, for example), and before tests have been conducted. It is possible to weigh from a distance the kilograms of uranium which have been made in centrifuges, and to count how much of them have been hidden or enriched; but the great mystery is the degree of success achieved by the "weapons group," the teams of experts attempting to make the material explosive. Behind the heap of words, presented as "a low or medium level of certainty," the differences between the worst-case and the best-case views on when Iran will be capable of producing a nuclear weapon are not that great. These range from somewhere between 2009 and the following five years, starting in 2010. Even McConnell's intelligence officers agree that Iran can buy nukes off the shelf - from Syria, North Korea and maybe Pakistan - and that the renewal of the program, if it is indeed on a coffee break, depends only on the intentions of the rulers, and those intentions will change only when the rulers are replaced. The CIA is so angry with Bush, it seems, that it is ready to go to great lengths in order to help another president. Not Ahmadinejad, God forbid, but the next president in Washington. The result is likely to be the opposite: Higher Iranian militancy along with Bush and Cheney's determination to act - regardless of what the intelligence agencies say. Related articles: Barak: Iran has probably restarted nuke program ANALYSIS: Iran nuke study pulls military option off the table Bush warns nuclear Iran could spur 'World War III' Study: U.S., Israel should begin planning strike on Iran nuclear sites

I told you so! Gates bashes Iran, saying they are in Iraq

Secretary Robert Gates, speaking to Persian Gulf officials gathered in Bahrain, urged continued pressure on Iran. (Pool Photo By Haraz N. Ghanbari)

Well, I did tell you so.

The US is now going to "get tough" following the National Intelligence Estimate, accusing Iran of arming insurgents. Here's from today's Washington Post. The headline is more than a bit misleading. The "meat" is a bit buried below. Figures.

Iran Aims 'To Foment Instability,' Gates Says

Nuclear Program Could Be Restarted, Defense Chief Warns

By Ann Scott Tyson

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 9, 2007; Page A27

MANAMA, Bahrain, Dec. 8 -- Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates argued forcefully at a Persian Gulf security conference Saturday that U.S. intelligence indicates Iran could restart its secret nuclear weapons program "at any time" and remains a major threat to the region.

Tough and at times sarcastic, Gates said the Iranian government also is supplying weapons to insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, backing the radical Islamic movements Hezbollah and Hamas, and developing medium-range ballistic missiles.

Gates acknowledged that the recent release of a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which determined that the country halted its secret nuclear weapons program in 2003, was awkward and frustrating for the Bush administration. He explained that the CIA director decides on the content and release, without influence from Congress or the executive branch.

The estimate clearly has come at an awkward time. It has annoyed a number of our friends. It has confused our allies around the world in terms of what we're trying to accomplish,"

he said.

International pressure is the only impediment to Iran restarting its nuclear weapons program, Gates said. "Iran is keeping its options open and could restart its nuclear weapons program at any time -- I would add, if it has not done so already."

Gates urged countries around the world to demand that Iran "come clean" about its past nuclear weapons development and insist that it suspend uranium enrichment, pledge not to develop nuclear weapons in the future and agree to inspections. Until it takes those steps, he suggested, engaging Iran in talks would not be productive.

Iran maintains that its nuclear program is for peaceful energy purposes.

At one point, Gates, a former head of the CIA, spoke mockingly of the Iranian government's agreement with the intelligence report.

"Astonishingly, the revolutionary government of Iran has this week, for the first time, embraced as valid an assessment of the United States intelligence community,"

Gates said. "

I assume that it also will embrace as valid

U.S. intelligence showing Iran is training militias in Iraq, backing terrorist organizations and carrying out other hostile acts,

he said.

Iranian officials decided Friday not to attend the conference.

In questions following Gates's speech, attendees voiced both approval and suspicion. Some accused the United States of a double standard for failing to object to Israel's possession of nuclear weapons. Asked whether he thought Israel's nuclear arsenal posed a threat to the region, Gates initially gave a four-word answer: "No, I do not."

Another questioner asserted that the intelligence report had "totally destroyed" any unanimity of the international community to pressure and sanction Iran on the nuclear issue.

Gates urged Gulf nations to shift their focus from bilateral military ties with the United States toward multilateral cooperation to better counter Iran and other threats. Specifically, he called for a collective effort to develop regional air and missile defense systems, as well as a shared monitoring of waters in the region for terrorism, piracy, drug trafficking and smuggling.

On Iraq, Gates said President Bush's troop increase over the past year has helped quell violence and demonstrated an enduring U.S. commitment to stabilizing the country. But he said the decline in U.S. troop levels starting this month represents "risks and opportunities for the whole region."

Arab nations should back the Iraqi government, Gates said, because if Iraq fails as a state, the repercussions will be felt first and most profoundly in the Middle East.

SPECIAL COMMENT on the NIE; You have no business being President! Goodbye and Good luck,

TRANSCRIPT

Finally, as promised, a Special Comment about the President's cataclysmic deception about Iran.

---

There are few choices more terrifying than the one Mr.. Bush has left us with tonight.

We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War Three about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole -- or we have a president too transcendently stupid not to have asked -- at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so -- whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed, were still even remotely plausible.

A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief. It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction: A critical juncture in our history and, contained in either answer, a president manifestly unfit to serve, and behind him in the vice presidency: an unapologetic war-monger who has long been seeing a world visible only to himself.

After Ms Perino's announcement from the White House late last night, the timeline is inescapable and clear.

In August the President was told by his hand-picked Major Domo of intelligence Mike McConnell, a flinty, high-strung-looking, worrying-warrior who will always see more clouds than silver linings, that what "everybody thought" about Iran might be, in essence, crap.

Yet on October 17th the President said of Iran and its president Ahmadinejad:

"I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War Three, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon."

And as he said that, Mr.. Bush knew that at bare minimum there was a strong chance that his rhetoric was nothing more than words with which to scare the Iranians.

Or was it, Sir, to scare the Americans?

Does Iran not really fit into the equation here? Have you just scribbled it into the fill-in-the-blank on the same template you used, to scare us about Iraq?

In August, any commander-in-chief still able-minded or uncorrupted or both, Sir, would have invoked the quality the job most requires: mental flexibility.

A bright man, or an honest man, would have realized no later than the McConnell briefing that the only true danger about Iran was the damage that could be done by an unhinged, irrational Chicken Little of a president, shooting his mouth off, backed up by only his own hysteria and his own delusions of omniscience.

Not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr. Bush.

The Chicken Little of presidents is the one, Sir, that you see in the mirror.

And the mind reels at the thought of a Vice President fully briefed on the revised Intel as long as two weeks ago -- briefed on the fact that Iran abandoned its pursuit of this imminent threat four years ago -- who never bothered to mention it to his boss.

It is nearly forgotten today, but throughout much of Ronald Reagan's presidency it was widely believed that he was little more than a front-man for some never-viewed, behind-the-scenes, string-puller.

Today, as evidenced by this latest remarkable, historic malfeasance, it is inescapable, that Dick Cheney is either this president's evil ventriloquist, or he thinks he is.

What servant of any of the 42 previous presidents could possibly withhold information of this urgency and gravity, and wind up back at his desk the next morning, instead of winding up before a Congressional investigation -- or a criminal one?

Mr. Bush -- if you can still hear us -- if you did not previously agree to this scenario in which Dick Cheney is the actual detective and you're Remington Steele -- you must disenthrall yourself: Mr. Cheney has usurped your constitutional powers, cut you out of the information loop, and led you down the path to an unprecedented presidency in which the facts are optional, the Intel is valued less than the hunch, and the assistant runs the store.

The problem is, Sir, your assistant is robbing you -- and your country -- blind.

Not merely in monetary terms, Mr.. Bush, but more importantly of the traditions and righteousness for which we have stood, at great risk, for centuries: Honesty, Law, Moral Force.

Mr.. Cheney has helped, Sir, to make your Administration into the kind our ancestors saw in the 1860's and 1870's and 1880's -- the ones that abandoned Reconstruction, and sent this country marching backwards into the pit of American Apartheid.

Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland...

Presidents who will be remembered only in a blur of failure, Mr.. Bush.

Presidents who will be remembered only as functions of those who opposed them -- the opponents whom history proved right.

Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland... Bush.

Would that we could let this President off the hook by seeing him only as marionette or moron.

But a study of the mutation of his language about Iran proves that though he may not be very good at it, he is, himself, still a manipulative, Machiavellian, snake-oil salesman.

The Bushian etymology was tracked by Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post's website.

It is staggering.

March 31st: "Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon..."

June 5th: Iran's "pursuit of nuclear weapons..."

June 19th: "consequences to the Iranian government if they continue to pursue a nuclear weapon..."

July 12th: "the same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons..."

August 6th: "this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon..."

Notice a pattern?

Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.

Then, sometime between August 6th and August 9th, those terms are suddenly swapped out, so subtly that only in retrospect can we see that somebody has warned the President, not only that he has gone out too far on the limb of terror -- but there may not even be a tree there...

McConnell, or someone, must have briefed him then.

August 9th: "They have expressed their desire to be able to enrich uranium, which we believe is a step toward having a nuclear weapons program..."

August 28th: "Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons..."

October 4th: "you should not have the know-how on how to make a (nuclear) weapon..."

October 17th: "until they suspend and/or make it clear that they, that their statements aren't real, yeah, I believe they want to have the **capacity**, the **knowledge**, in order to make a nuclear weapon."

Before August 9th, it's: Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.

After August 9th, it's: Desire, pursuit, want...knowledge technology know-how to enrich uranium.

And we are to believe, Mr.. Bush, that the National Intelligence Estimate this week talks of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program in 2003...

And you talked of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program on October 17th...

And that's just a coincidence?

---

And we are to believe, Mr.. Bush, that nobody told you any of this until last week?

Your insistence that you were not briefed on the NIE until last week might be legally true -- something like "what the definition of is is -- but with the subject matter being not interns but the threat of nuclear war.

Legally, it might save you from some war crimes trial... but ethically, it is a lie.

It is indefensible.

You have been yelling threats into a phone for nearly four months, after the guy on the other end had already hung up.

You, Mr.. Bush, are a bald-faced liar.

--

And more over, you have just revealed that John Bolton, and Norman Podhoretz, and the Wall Street Journal Editorial board, are also bald-faced liars.

We are to believe that the Intel Community, or maybe the State Department, cooked the raw intelligence about Iran, falsely diminished the Iranian nuclear threat, to make you look bad?

And you proceeded to let them make you look bad?

---

You not only knew all of this about Iran, in early August...

But you also knew... it was... accurate.

And instead of sharing this good news with the people you have obviously forgotten you represent...

You merely fine-tuned your terrorizing of those people, to legally cover your own backside...

While you filled the factual gap with sadistic visions of -- as you phrased it on August 28th: a quote "nuclear holocaust" -- and, as you phrased it on October 17th, quote: "World War Three."

---

My comments, Mr. Bush, are often dismissed as simple repetitions of the phrase "George Bush has no business being president."

Well, guess what?

Tonight: hanged by your own words... convicted by your own deliberate lies...

You, sir, have no business... being president.

---

Good night, and good luck.

IMPEACH!! IMPEACH!! about high time!!

MORE NIE fallout .. Chief of Staff goes to Isreal

IDF to show US nuclear data on Iran

By YAAKOV KATZ

Disappointed after failing to make their case on Iran and influence the outcome of the United States's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released this week, Military Intelligence will present its hard core evidence on the Islamic Republic's nuclear program on Sunday to the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff during a rare visit he will be making to Israel.

Iran's nuclear enrichment facility in Natanz.
Photo: AP [file]

Admiral Michael Mullen will land in Israel Sunday morning for a 24-hour visit that will include a one-on-one meeting with IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, as well as with Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

According to a Time magazine article published Wednesday, Mullen is a member of the Pentagon's "anti-war [with Iran] group" that includes Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral William Fallon, current commander of the US Central Command.

In a recent press briefing in Washington, however, Mullen took a hard-line approach, refusing to rule out the possibility that military force will be used to stop Iran's race towards nuclear power.

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"I would never take the military option off the table," Mullen told reporters, although he stressed that his remark did not mean that force would be used. Diplomacy, he added, was very important.

Mullen's visit to Israel will be exactly a week after the publication of the NIE report that claimed Iran had frozen its nuclear military program in 2003 and has yet to restart it. During his visit, Military Intelligence plans to present him with Israel's evidence that Iran is in fact developing nuclear weapons.

"The report clearly shows that we did not succeed in making our case over the past year in the run-up to this report," a defense official said Thursday. "Mullen's visit is an opportunity to try and fix that."

In addition to Iran, Ashkenazi and his staff will also discuss with Mullen America's commitment for Israel to retain its qualitative edge in the face of the sale of advanced JDAM missiles to Saudi Arabia.

In the past, Israel had asked the Pentagon to permit the sale of the F-22 fifth-generation stealth fighter jet - also known as the Raptor - but the request was rejected.

Mullen will be met by an honor guard at the Kirya Military Headquarters in Tel Aviv and will sit through a day of presentations by IDF generals, including Military Intelligence chief Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin and OC IDF Planning Maj.-Gen. Ido Nehushtan.

Sunday night he will be honored at a festive dinner hosted by Ashkenazi and will leave Israel Monday morning.

The presentations that Mullen will hear will be on a wide range of topics - including the Hamas buildup in the Gaza Strip, Egypt's failure to stop the smuggling of weapons into Gaza, Hizbullah activities in Lebanon, Syria and Iran.

Israel plans to take advantage of Mullen's visit to Israel to reinforce the already strong ties the IDF has with the Pentagon and the US armed forces. Appreciation for the IDF has increased within the Pentagon in recent months following the Israeli air strike on the alleged Syrian nuclear reactor.

Mullen's visit will be the first time a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has visited Israel in the past decade. Mullen was in Israel with his wife two years ago when he was the commander of the Navy.

He met Ashkenazi at the NATO military commander conference in Brussels last month, and the two have already established an effective work relationship, defense officials said.

Also Thursday, China's government said it was studying the US intelligence review and remained steadfast in its opinion that talks were the way to end the standoff with Iran.

"We will earnestly study the report and make communications with relevant parties," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters at a regular briefing. "China's position on the Iranian nuclear issue is that we support the international nuclear nonproliferation regime, and oppose proliferation of nuclear weapons, and we uphold a peaceful and stable Middle East," Qin said.

Earlier this week, China's ambassador to the United Nations said the report raised concerns about new sanctions.

"I think the council members will have to consider that, because I think we all start from the presumption that now things have changed," Chinese UN Ambassador Wang Guangya said Tuesday when asked whether the release of the intelligence estimate made the prospect of new UN sanctions less likely.

The New York Times reported Thursday that the change in the US's intelligence assessment vis-à-vis Iran was based mainly on notes acquired last summer from discussions between Iranian military officials. The notes reportedly detailed conversations in which certain army officials complained about Iranian leaders' 2003 decision to shut down efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

The notes gave no clue as to why Iran had decided to stop weapons development. The information contained in the notes was supported by other intelligence, including conversations between Iranian officials which had been intercepted in recent months, the paper reported.

Meanwhile, US Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday said he had no reason to doubt the intelligence assessment.

"There's always the possibility that circumstances will change. But I think they've done the best job they can with the intelligence that's available," Cheney told Politico.com.

The vice president stressed that the administration would not change its policy towards Iran. "We still think there's a need to continue the course we've been on to persuade the Iranians not to enrich uranium," he said.

AP contributed to the report.

IMPEACHMENT TOOLKIT: NIE on the United States; Chalmers Johnson, 01/07

A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States(1)

By Chalmers Johnson(2)

KEY JUDGMENTS

01/17/07 "Harpers Magazine" -- -- The United States remains, for the moment, the most powerful nation in history, but it faces a violent contradiction between its long republican tradition and its more recent imperial ambitions.

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democrat¬ic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

Several factors, however, indicate that this course will be a brief one, which most likely will end in economic and political collapse.

Military Keynesianism: The imperial project is expensive. The flow of the nation’s wealth – from taxpayers and (increasingly) foreign lenders through the government to military contractors and (decreasingly) back to the taxpayers – has created a form of “military Keynesianism,” in which the domestic economy re¬quires sustained military ambition in order to avoid recession or collapse.

The Unitary Presidency: Sustained military ambition is inherently anti-republican, in that it tends to concentrate power in the executive branch. In the United States, President George W. Bush subscribes to an esoteric interpretation of the Constitution called the theory of the unitary executive, which holds, in effect, that the president has the authority to ignore the separation of powers written into the Constitution, creating a feed¬back loop in which permanent war and the unitary presidency are mutually reinforcing.

Failed Checks on Executive Ambition: The U.S. legislature and judiciary appear to be incapable of restraining the president and therefore restraining imperial ambition. Direct opposition from the people, in the form of democratic action or violent uprising, is unlikely because the television and print media have by and large found it unprofitable to inform the public about the actions of the country’s leaders. Nor is it likely that the military will attempt to take over the executive branch by way of a coup.

Bankruptcy and Collapse: Confronted by the limits of its own vast but nonetheless finite financial resources and lacking the political check on spending provided by a functioning democracy, the United States will within a very short time face financial or even political collapse at home and a significantly diminished ability to project force abroad.

DISCUSSION

Military Keynesianism

The ongoing U.S. militarization of its foreign affairs has spiked precipitously in recent years, with increasingly expensive commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq. These commitments grew from many specific political factors, including the ideological predilections of the current regime, the growing need for material access to the oil-rich regions of the Middle East, and a long-term bipartisan emphasis on hegemony as a basis for national security. The domestic economic basis for these commitments, however, is consistently overlooked. Indeed, America’s hegemonic policy is in many ways most accurately understood as the inevitable result of its decades-long policy of military Keynesianism.

During the Depression that preceded World War II, the English economist John Maynard Keynes, a liberal capitalist, proposed a form of governance that would mitigate the boom-and-bust cycles inherent in capitalist economies. To prevent the economy from contracting, a development typically accompanied by social unrest, Keynes thought the government should take on debt in order to put people back to work. Some of these deficit-financed government jobs might be socially useful, but Keynes was not averse to creating make-work tasks if necessary. During periods of prosperity, the government would cut spending and rebuild the treasury. Such countercyclical planning was called “pump-priming.”

Upon taking office in 1933, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, with the assistance of Congress, put several Keynesian measures into effect, including socialized retirement plans, minimum wages for all workers, and government-financed jobs on massive projects, including the Triborough Bridge in New York City, the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, a flood-control and electric-power-generation complex covering seven states. Conservative capitalists feared that this degree of government intervention would delegitimate capitalism – which they understood as an economic system of quasi-natural laws – and shift the balance of power from the capitalist class to the working class and its unions. For these reasons, establishment figures tried to hold back countercyclical spending.

The onset of World War II, however, made possible a significantly modified form of state socialism. The exiled Polish economist Michal Kalecki attributed Germany’s success in overcoming the global Depression to a phenomenon that has come to be known as “military Keynesianism.” Government spending on arms increased manufacturing and also had a multiplier effect on general consumer spending by raising worker incomes. Both of these points are in accordance with general Keynesian doctrine. In addition, the enlargement of standing armies absorbed many workers, often young males with few skills and less education. The military thus becomes an employer of last resort, like Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, but on a much larger scale.

Rather than make bridges and dams, however, workers would make bullets, tanks, and fighter planes. This made all the difference. Although Adolf Hitler did not undertake rearmament for purely economic reasons, the fact that he advocated governmental support for arms production made him acceptable not only to the German industrialists, who might otherwise have opposed his destabilizing expansionist policies, but also to many around the world who celebrated his achievement of a “German economic miracle.”

In the United States, Keynesian policies continued to benefit workers, but, as in Germany, they also increasingly benefited wealthy manu¬facturers and other capitalists. By the end of the war, the United States had seen a massive shift. Dwight Eisenhower, who helped win that war and later became president, described this shift in his 1961 presidential farewell address:

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women ate directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

Eisenhower went on to suggest that such an arrangement, which he called the “military¬-industrial complex,” could be perilous to American ideals. The short-term economic benefits were clear, but the very nature of those benefits – which were all too carefully distributed among workers and owners in “every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government” – tended to short-circuit Keynes’s insistence that government spending be cut back in good times. The prosperity of the United States came in¬creasingly to depend upon the construction and continual maintenance of a vast war machine, and so military supremacy and economic security became increasingly intertwined in the minds of voters. No one wanted to turn off the pump.

Between 1940 and 1996, for instance, the United States spent nearly $4.5 trillion on the development, testing, and construction of nuclear weapons alone. By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the United States possessed some 32,000 deliverable bombs. None of them was ever used, which illustrates perfectly Keynes’s observation that, in order to create jobs, the government might as well decide to bury money in old mines and “leave them to private enterprise on the well-tried principles of laissez faire to dig them up again.” Nuclear bombs were not just America’s secret weapon; they were also a secret economic weapon.

Such spending helped create economic growth that lasted until the 1973 oil crisis. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan once again brought the tools of military Keynesianism to bear, with a policy of significant tax cuts and massive deficit spending on military projects, allegedly to combat a new threat from Communism. Reagan’s military expenditures accounted for 5.9 percent of the gross domestic product in 1984, which in turn fueled a 7 percent growth rate for the economy as a whole and helped reelect Reagan by a landslide.

During the Clinton years military spending fell to about 3 percent of GDP, but the economy rallied strongly in Clinton’s second term due to the boom in information technologies, weakness in the previously competitive Japanese economy, and – paradoxically – serious efforts to reduce the national debt.(3) With the coming to power of George W. Bush, however, military Keynesianism returned once again. Indeed, after he began his war with Iraq, the once-erratic relationship between defense spending and economic growth became nearly parallel. A spike in defense spending in one quarter would see a spike in GDP, and a drop in defense spending would likewise see a drop in GDP.

To understand the real weight of military Keynesianism in the American economy today, however, one must approach official defense statistics with great care. The “defense” budget of the United States – that is, the reported budget of the Department of Defense – does not include: the Department of Energy’s spending on nuclear weapons ($16.4 billion slated for fiscal 2006), the Department of Homeland Security’s outlays for the actual “defense” of the United States ($41 billion), or the Department of Veterans Affairs’ responsibilities for the lifetime care of the seriously wounded ($68 billion). Nor does it include the billions of dollars the Department of State spends each year to finance foreign arms sales and militarily related development or the Treasury Department’s payments of pensions to military retirees and widows and their families (an amount not fully disclosed by official statistics). Still to be added are interest payments by the Treasury to cover past debt-financed defense outlays. The economist Robert Higgs estimates that in 2002 such interest payments amounted to $138.7 billion.

Even when all these things are included, Enron-style accounting makes it hard to obtain an accurate understanding of U.S. dependency on military spending. In 2005, the Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that “neither DOD nor Congress can reliably know how much the war is costing” or “details on how the appropriated funds are being spent.” Indeed, the GAO found that, lacking a reliable method for tracking military costs, the Army had taken to simply inserting into its accounts figures that matched the available budget. Such actions seem absurd in terms of military logic. But they are perfectly logical responses to the requirements of military Keynesianism, which places its emphasis not on the demand for defense but rather on the available supply of money.

The Unitary Presidency

Military Keynesianism may be economic development by other means, but it does very often lead to real war, or, if not real war, then a signif¬icantly warlike political environment. This creates a feedback loop: American presidents know that military Keynesianism tends to concentrate power in the executive branch, and so presidents who seek greater power have a natural inducement to encourage further growth of the military-industrial complex. As the phenomena feed on each other, the usual outcome is a real war, based not on the needs of national defense but rather on the domestic political logic of military Keynesianism. As U.S. Senator Robert La Follette Sr. observed,

“In times of peace, the war party insists on mak¬ing preparation for war. As soon as prepared for war, it insists on making war.”

George W. Bush has taken this natural political phenomenon to an extreme never before experienced by the American electorate. Every president has sought greater authority, but Bush – whose father lost his position as forty-first president in a fair and open election – appears to believe that increasing presidential authority is both a birthright and a central component of his his¬torical legacy. He is supported in this belief by his vice president and chief adviser, Dick Cheney.

In pursuit of more power, Bush and Cheney have unilaterally authorized preventive war against nations they designate as needing “regime change,” directed American soldiers to torture persons they have seized and imprisoned in various countries, ordered the National Security Agency to carry out illegal “data mining” surveillance of the American people, and done everything they could to prevent Congress from outlawing “cruel, inhumane, or degrading” treatment of people detained by the United States. Each of these actions has been undertaken for specific ideological, tactical, or practical rea¬sons, but also as part of a general campaign of power concentration.

Cheney complained in 2002 that, since he had served as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, he had seen a significant erosion in executive power as post-Watergate presidents were forced to “cough up and compromise on important principles.” He was referring to such reforms as the War Powers Act of 1973, which requires that the president obtain congressional ap¬proval within ninety days of ordering troops into combat; the Budget and Impoundment Con¬trol Act of 1974, which was designed to stop Nixon from impounding funds for programs he did not like; the Freedom of Information Act of 1966, which Congress strengthened in 1974; President Ford’s Executive Order 11905 of 1976, which outlawed political assassination; and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, which gave more power to the House and Sen¬ate select committees on intelligence. Cheney said that these reforms were “unwise” because they “weaken the presidency and the vice presidency,” and added that he and the president felt an obligation “to pass on our offices in bet¬ter shape than we found them.”

No president, however, has ever acknowledged the legitimacy of the War Powers Act, and most of these so-called limitations on presidential power had been gutted, ignored, or violated long before Cheney became vice president. Republican Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire said,

“The vice president may be the only person I know of that believes the executive has somehow lost power over the last thirty years.”

Bush and Cheney have made it a primary goal of their terms in office, nonetheless, to carve executive power into the law, and the war has been the primary vehicle for such ac¬tions. John Yoo, Bush’s deputy assistant attor¬ney general from 2001 to 2003, writes in his book War By Other Means, “We are used to a peacetime system in which Congress enacts laws, the President enforces them, and the courts interpret them. In wartime, the gravity shifts to the executive branch.” Bush has claimed that he is “the commander” and “the decider” and that therefore he does not “owe anybody an explanation” for anything.(4)

Similarly, in a September 2006 press confer¬ence, White House spokesman Tony Snow en¬gaged in this dialogue:

Q: Isn’t it the Supreme Court that’s supposed to decide whether laws are unconstitutional or not?

A: No, as a matter of fact the president has an obligation to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. That is an obligation that presidents have enacted through signing statements going back to Jefferson. So, while the Supreme Court can be an arbiter of the Constitution, the fact is the president is the one, the only person who, by the Constitution, is given the responsibility to preserve, protect, and defend that document, so it is perfectly consistent with presidential authority under the Constitution itself.

Snow was referring to the president’s habit of signing bills into law accompanied by “statements” that, according to the American Bar Association, “assert President Bush’s authority to disregard or decline to enforce laws adopted by Congress.” All forty-two previous U.S. presidents combined have signed statements exempting themselves from the provisions of 568 new laws, whereas, Bush has, to date, exempted himself from more than 1,000.

Failed Checks on Executive Ambition


The current administration’s perspective on political power is far from unique. Few, if any, presidents have refused the increased executive authority that is the natural byproduct of military Keynesianism. Moreover, the division of power between the president, the Congress, and the judiciary – often described as the bedrock of Amer¬ican democracy – has eroded significantly in re¬cent years. The people, the press, and the military, too, seem anxious to cede power to a “wartime” president, leaving Bush, or those who follow him, almost entirely unobstructed in pursuing the im¬perial project.

Congress: Corrupt and indifferent, Congress, which the Founders believed would be the lead¬ing branch of government, has already entirely forfeited the power to declare war. More recently, it gave the president the legal right to detain anyone, even American citizens, without warrant, and to detain non-citizens without recourse to habeas corpus, as well as to use a variety of interrogation methods that he could define, at his sole discretion, to be or not be torture.

The Courts: The judicial branch is hardly more effective in restraining presidential ambition. The Supreme Court was active in the installation of the current president, and the lower courts increasingly are packed with judges who believe they should defer to his wishes. In 2006, for instance, U.S. District Judge David Trager dismissed a suit by a thirty-five-year-old Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, who in 2002 was seized by U.S. government agents at John F. Kennedy Airport and delivered to Syria, where he was tortured for ten months before being released. No charges were filed against Arar, and his torturers eventually admitted he had no links to any crime. In explaining his dismissal, Trager noted with approval an earlier Supreme Court finding that such judgment would

“threaten ‘our customary policy of deference to the President in matters of foreign affairs.’ ”

The Military: It is possible that the U.S. military could take over the government and declare a dictatorship.(5) That is how the Roman republic ended. For the military voluntarily to move toward direct rule, however, its leaders would have to ignore their ties to civilian society, where the symbolic importance of constitutional legitimacy remains potent. Rebellious officers may well worry about how the American people would react to such a move. Moreover, prosecutions of low-level military torturers from Abu Ghraib prison and killers of civilians in Iraq have demonstrated to enlisted ranks that obedience to illegal orders can result in their being punished, whereas officers go free. No one knows whether ordinary American soldiers would obey clearly illegal orders to oust an elected government or whether the officer corps has sufficient confidence to issue such orders. In addition, the present system already offers the military high command so much – in funds, prestige, and future employment via the military-industrial revolving door – that a perilous transition to anything resembling direct military rule would make little sense under reasonably normal conditions.

The People: Could the people themselves restore constitutional government? A grass roots movement to break the hold of the military-industrial complex and establish public financing of elections is conceivable. But, given the conglomerate control of the mass media and the difficulties of mobilizing the United States’ large and diffuse population, it is unlikely. Moreover, the people themselves have enjoyed the Keynesian benefits of the U.S. imperial project and – in all but a few cases – have not yet suffered any of its consequences.(6)

Bankruptcy and Collapse

The more likely check on presidential power, and on U.S. military ambition, will be the economic failure that is the inevitable consequence of military Keynesianism. Traditional Keynes¬ianism is a stable two-part system composed of deficit spending in bad times and debt payment in good times. Military Keynesianism is an unstable one-part system. With no political check, debt accrues until it reaches a crisis point.

In the fiscal 2006 budget, the Congressional Research Service estimates that Pentagon spending on Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom will be about $10 billion per month, or an extra $120.3 billion for the year. As of mid-2006, the overall cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since their inception stood at more than $400 billion. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, and his colleague, Linda Bilmes, have tried to put together an estimate of the real costs of the Iraq war. They calculate that it will cost about $2 trillion by 2015. The conservative American Enterprise Institute suggests a figure at the opposite end of the spectrum – $1 trillion. Both figures are an order of magnitude larger than what the Bush Administration publicly acknowledges.

At the same time, the U.S. trade deficit, the largest component of the current account deficit, soared to an all-time high in 2005 of $782.7 billion, the fourth consecutive year that America’s trade debts set records. The trade deficit with China alone rose to $201.5 billion, the highest imbalance ever recorded with any country. Meanwhile, since mid-2000, the country has lost nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs. To try to cope with these imbalances, on March 16, 2006, Con¬gress raised the national debt limit from $8.2 trillion to $9 trillion. This was the fourth time since George W. Bush took office that the limit had to be raised. Had Congress not raised it, the U.S. government would not have been able to borrow more money and would have had to default on its massive debts.

Among the creditors that finance this un¬precedented sum, two of the largest are the central banks of China ($854 billion in reserves of dollars and other foreign currencies) and Japan ($850 billion), both of which are the managers of the huge trade surpluses these countries enjoy with the United States. This helps explain why the United States’ debt burden has not yet triggered what standard economic theory would predict, which is a steep decline in the value of the U.S. dollar followed by a severe contraction of the American economy – the Chinese and Japanese governments continue to be willing to be paid in dollars in order to sustain American demand for their exports. For the sake of domestic employment, both countries lend huge amounts to the American treasury, but there is no guarantee how long they will want or be able to do so.

CONFIDENCE IN KEY JUDGMENTS


It is difficult to predict the course of a democracy, and perhaps even more so when that democracy is as corrupt as that of the United States. With a new opposition party in the majority in the House, the country could begin a difficult withdrawal from military Keynesianism. Like the British after World War II, the United States could choose to keep its democracy by giving up its empire. The British did not do a particularly brilliant job of liquidating their empire, and there were several clear cases in which British imperialists defied their nation’s commitment to democracy in order to keep their foreign privileges – Kenya in the 1950s is a particularly savage example – but the people of the British Isles did choose democracy over imperialism, and that nation continues to thrive as a nation, if not as an empire.

It appears for the moment, however, that the people of the United States prefer the Roman approach and so will abet their government in maintaining a facade of constitutional democracy until the nation drifts into bankruptcy.

Of course, bankruptcy will not mean the literal end of the United States any more than it did for Germany in 1923, China in 1948, or Argentina in 2001. It might, in fact, open the way for an unexpected restoration of the American system, or for military rule, revolution, or simply some new development we cannot yet imagine. Certainly, such a bankruptcy would mean a drastic lowering of the current American standard of living, a loss of control over international affairs, a process of adjusting to the rise of other powers, including China and India, and a further discrediting of the notion that the United States is somehow exceptional compared with other nations. The American people will be forced to learn what it means to be a far poorer nation and the attitudes and manners that go with it.(7)

Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and, most recently, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, which will be published in February by Metropolitan Books. His last article for Harper’s Magazine, “The War Business: Squeezing a Profit from the Wreckage in Iraq,” appeared in the November 2003 issue.

———

Notes

(1) The CIA’s website defines a National Intelligence Estimate as “the most authoritative written judgment concerning a national security issue prepared by the Director of Central Intelligence.” These forecasts of “future developments” and “their implications for the United States” seldom are made public, but there are exceptions. One was the NIE of September 2002, “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction,” which became notorious because virtually word in it was false. Another, an April 2006 NIE entitled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,” was partly declassified by President Bush because its main conclusion – that “activists identifying themselves as jihadists” are “increasing in both number and geographic dispersion” – had already been leaked to the press.


(2) The CIA is prohibited from writing an NIE on the United States, and so I have here attempted to do so myself, using the standard format for such estimates. I have some personal knowledge of NIEs because from 1967 to 1973 I served as an outside consultant to the CIA’s Office of National Estimates.

1 was one of about a dozen so-called experts invited to read draft NIEs in order to provide quality control and prevent bureaucratic logrolling.


(3) Military Keynesianism, it turns out, is not the only way to boost an economy.

(4) In a January 2006 debate, Yoo was asked if any law could stop the president, if he “deems that he’s got to tor¬ture somebody,” from, say, “crushing the testicles of the person’s child.” Yoo’s response: “I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.”


(5) Though they undoubtedly would find a more user-friendly name for it.

(6) In 2003, when the Iraq war began, the citizens of the United States could at least claim that it was the work of an administration that had lost the popular vote. But in 2004, Bush won that vote by more than 3 million ballots, making his war ours.

(7) National Intelligence Estimates seldom contain startling new data. To me they always read like magazine articles or well-researched and footnoted graduate seminar papers. When my wife once asked me what was so secret about them, I answered that perhaps it was the fact that this was the best we could do.

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