Now here's a post about NEOCON Robert D. Kaplan !!

This is from In the Wilderness .. 

[This is a sharp-eyed look at the madness of a major neocon talking-head regarding China policy. But for perspective-by-analogy, let me ask you a question about Iran. Ever wonder what would have come about in Iran had the Central Intelligence Agency not fomented an illegal coup d'etat against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh? He moved to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, triggering the wrath of the American economic hitmen who engineered his sudden overthrow in 1953. That clever piece of finesse brought the bitter ordeal of the bogus Shah of Iran, his notorious Savak secret police, the 1979 Shiite revolution, and the eventual sabotage of the entire Carter Presidency - which was, let's remember, the last hope for a timely mitigation of Peak Oil. And now they're in something called the Axis of Evil.

The Iranian example is just as relevant for Venezuela, where Uncle Sam recently tried and failed to repeat the trick, as it is for China, where he can't. In every case, guys who haven't read Verse 61 of the Tao Teh Ching take it upon themselves to intervene in other people's affairs in the pursuit of their own short-term advantage. They do so in the name of "realism," because that category acts like a mirror to those who would operate under its cover: my policy reproduces an existing world of scarcity and danger and resentment; by comparison, yours is unrealistic - therefore, I'm the credible adult in charge, and you're the dreamer on the margin.

The Realist's low expectations of others are a mask for his desire for their goods. He wants to raid his neighbors, so he laments aloud that they are such a hostile people, it will be necessary to destroy them. In wrecking the place, the Realist makes the world match his vision of it, then boasts that he was right. --JAH]

China in America's cross-hairs: 
Robert D. Kaplan and neocon hawks clamor for new Cold War

By 
Larry Chin

© Copyright 2005, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. This story may NOT be posted on any Internet web site without express written permission. Contact admin@copvcia.com. May be circulated, distributed or transmitted for non-profit purposes only. 

June 20, 2005 1100 PST (FTW) The feature story of the June 2005 issue of The Atlantic Monthly is Robert D. Kaplan's "How We Would Fight China: The Next Cold War". This inevitable war, according to Kaplan, "will link China and the United States in a future that may stretch over several generations." By comparison, "the Middle East is just a blip." 

Kaplan's provocative China piece, detailed below, coincides with increasingly confrontational rhetoric by the Bush administration, the growing influence of neocon hardliners, growing concern about China within the elite cadres of the New World Order (from the G-7 to the Bilderberg Group), tensions between China and Japan (the US proxy in the region), and more East-West trade bickering (currencies, etc.). In February 2005, new CIA Director Porter Goss issued a warning to China regarding its military modernization. One day later, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued a similar warning. 

Does the militaristic Kaplan article, afloat upon the growing hostilities between the US and China, mark the beginning of a dangerous new phase of conflict and superpower war?

Who is Robert D. Kaplan?
In a post-9/11 political landscape crawling with warmongering policymakers and military-utopian intelligentsia, Kaplan deserves singling out. It is not Kaplan's wild views, but his influence - the fact that he has the ear of top military and intelligence brass, and enjoys a symbiotic relationship with elites at the highest levels - that is of greater importance. 

Kaplan is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and the author of nine books on international affairs, including Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, and international travel books with distinctly political biases, such as Balkan Ghosts and Eastward to Tartary. 

Fascinated (some would say obsessed) with military/intelligence and war, Kaplan's upcoming book, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground is one of several books he is writing about the US armed forces. 

Kaplan's essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He has appeared on C-SPAN and CNN. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls Kaplan among the "most widely read" authors defining the post-Cold War (along with Francis Fukuyama and Harvard's Samuel Huntington).

Kaplan is a favorite of both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. According to U. S. News & World Report, "President Clinton was so impressed with Kaplan, he ordered an interagency study of these issues, and it agreed with Kaplan's conclusions." Kaplan was invited to meet with George W. Bush in the White House - and brief Bush on foreign policy. 

Kaplan is also a consultant to the US Army's Special Forces Regiment, the US Air Force, and the US Marines. He has lectured at military war colleges, the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), and the FBI. Kaplan has lectured at the State Department. More recently, Kaplan was embedded with US forces during the attack on Fallujah, and has spent considerable time with the US military over the past three years. In other words, Kaplan is a military-intelligence insider. 

Kaplan has a reputation for being one of the first American writers to forecast (from as far back as the 1980s) the Clinton-Bush administration wars in the Balkans and Central Asia, and the current 9/11 War (Afghanistan, Iraq).

More on the link above .. 

Bush lawyers discussed fate of CIA tapes

By Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

WASHINGTON: At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.

Those who took part, the officials said, included Alberto Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet Miers, who succeeded Gonzales as White House counsel.

It was previously reported that some administration officials had advised against destroying the tapes, but the emerging picture of White House involvement is more complex. In interviews, several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the tapes should be destroyed.

One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been "vigorous sentiment" among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes. The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure of the tapes could have been particularly damaging after revelations a year earlier of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. (or becuz they have real information on 9/11??)

Some other officials assert that no one at the White House advocated destroying the tapes. Those officials acknowledged, however, that no White House lawyer gave a direct order to preserve the tapes or advised that destroying them would be illegal.

The destruction of the tapes is being investigated by the Justice Department, and the officials would not agree to be quoted by name while that inquiry is under way.

Spokesmen for the White House, the vice president's office and the CIA declined to comment for this article, also citing the inquiry.

The new information came to light as a federal judge on Tuesday ordered a hearing into whether the tapes' destruction violated an order to preserve evidence in a lawsuit brought on behalf of 16 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The tapes documented harsh interrogation methods used in 2002 on Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, two Qaeda suspects in CIA custody.

The current and former officials also provided new details about the role played in November 2005 by Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the chief of the agency's clandestine branch, who ultimately ordered the destruction of the tapes.

The officials said that before he issued a secret cable directing that the tapes be destroyed, Rodriguez received legal guidance from two CIA lawyers, Steven Hermes and Robert Eatinger. The officials said that those lawyers gave written guidance to Rodriguez that he had the authority to destroy the tapes and that the destruction would violate no laws.

The agency did not make either Hermes or Eatinger available for comment.

Current and former officials said the two lawyers informed the CIA's top lawyer, John Rizzo, about the legal advice they had provided. But officials said Rodriguez did not inform either Rizzo or Porter Goss, the CIA director, before he sent the cable to destroy the tapes.

"There was an expectation on the part of those providing legal guidance that additional bases would be touched," said one government official with knowledge of the matter. "That didn't happen."

Robert Bennett, a lawyer for Rodriguez, insisted that his client had done nothing wrong and suggested that Rodriguez had been authorized to order the destruction of the tapes. "He had a green light to destroy them," Bennett said.

Until their destruction, the tapes were stored in a safe in the CIA station in the country where the interrogations took place, current and former officials said. According to one former senior intelligence official, the tapes were never sent back to CIA headquarters, despite what the official described as concern about keeping such highly classified material overseas.

Top officials of the C.I.A's clandestine service had pressed repeatedly beginning in 2003 for the tapes' destruction, out of concern that they could leak and put operatives in both legal and physical jeopardy.

The only White House official previously reported to have taken part in the discussions was Miers, who served as a deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush until early 2005, when she took over as White House counsel. While one official had said previously that Miers's involvement began in 2003, other current and former officials said they did not believe she joined the discussions until 2005.

Besides the Justice Department inquiry, the congressional intelligence committees have begun investigations into the destruction of the tapes, and are looking into the role that officials at the White House and Justice Department might have played in discussions about them. The CIA never provided the tapes to federal prosecutors or to the Sept. 11 commission, and some lawmakers have suggested that their destruction may have amounted to obstruction of justice.

Newsweek reported this week that John Negroponte, who was director of national intelligence at the time the tapes were destroyed, sent a memorandum in the summer of 2005 to Goss, the CIA director, advising him against destroying the tapes. Negroponte left the job this year to become deputy secretary of state, and a spokesman for the director of national intelligence declined to comment on the Newsweek article.

The court hearing in the Guantánamo case, set for Friday in Washington by District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. over the government's objections, will be the first public forum in which officials submit to questioning about the tapes' destruction.

There is no publicly known connection between the 16 plaintiffs — 14 Yemenis, an Algerian and a Pakistani — and the CIA videotapes. But lawyers in several Guantánamo cases contend that the government may have used information from the CIA interrogations to identify their clients as "unlawful combatants" and hold them at Guantánamo for as long as six years.

"We hope to establish a procedure to review the government's handling of evidence in our case," said David Remes, a lawyer representing the 16 detainees.

Jonathan Hafetz, who represents a Qatari prisoner at Guantánamo and filed a motion on Tuesday seeking a separate hearing, said the videotapes could well be relevant.

"If the government is relying on the statement of a witness under harsh interrogation, a videotape of the interrogation would be very relevant,"

said Hafetz, of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University law school.

In addition to the Guantánamo court filings, the American Civil Liberties Union has asked a federal judge to hold the CIA in contempt of court for destroying the tapes. The ACLU says the destruction violated orders in a Freedom of Information Act case brought by several advocacy groups seeking materials related to detention and interrogation.