"The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy", Part 2 of 6

Continuing on with our critique of Sean Hannity's book, "Let Freedom Ring", let's take a look the first example he uses in an attempt to prove that there is a liberal conspiracy against the CIA and intelligence in general.

On page 29, Hannity says:

"Is it time to get rid of the CIA?" asked a post-9/11 story by Ted Gup in the left-wing magazine Mother Jones.

In the face of the death of heroes like Mike Spann [(who became the first CIA casualty in Afghanistan when he was killed in a prison uprising at Mazur-e-Sharif)], how do liberals have the gall to ask such questions? Get rid of our most important intelligence organization? During wartime? Is that what liberals really want in their heart of hearts? Few would admit it on the record. But the Mother Jones article does provide a fascinating, if deeply disturbing, insight into the Left's mindset:

Today, the CIA is hamstrung by its own sullied past. At home, critics suspect it of having had a hand in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, of introducing crack cocaine into South Central Los Angeles, and of a host of other conspiracies that remain utterly unproved. Overseas, its past shadows it from country to country and continent to continent, clouding America's moral standing and its ability to gather the kind of intelligence that the nation will need in the years ahead.

Americans have long viewed the CIA as a rogue agency, its errant missions the work of covert cowboys. The truth-that everything it did, good and bad, originated in the Oval Office with either a presidential directive or a wink and a nod-is less comforting. It means that we as a nation bear a measure of responsibility for its actions, and its failures. Whether the CIA is still capable of effectively serving the nation is a question that can no longer be ignored.

So not only is the CIA a rogue agency-I guess we're a rogue nation!

Does Hannity's accusation hold up? Let's check the facts:

1.) First a little bit of background. Who is Ted Gup, the article's author? Publishers Weekly described him as a "former investigative journalist with the Washington Post and Time and winner of a George Polk Award" when it did a review of his book "The Book of Honor : Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA".

The "Book of Honor" Gup wrote about is in the lobby of CIA Headquarters and contains the names of all the CIA operatives who have been killed in the line of duty. Actually, some of the entries are left blank because the particular operation the officer had been involved in is still classified (often needlessly, but more on that in a moment). Ted Gup decided to uncover the identities of these fallen heroes and tell their stories; interviewing over 400 CIA officers and reading through thousands of pages of documents.

Did this book threaten national security? In an interview with "The News Hour" on PBS, Gup said, "I think that [the reason] most of these names are not inscribed in the Book of Honor is not national security, it's bureaucracy. ... It was the sheer momentum, the inertia of the bureaucracy that allowed this to continue." The interviewer, Ray Suarez, even noted that "we're talking about some people who've been dead 30, 40 years. The causes that they were assisting don't even really exist anymore as causes in this post world war world."

Besides bureaucracy, as Amazon.com's review of the book notes, in some cases Gup believes that "perhaps the agency's own sense of shame over botched operations" keeps them classified.

Nevertheless, Gup did say in the Suarez interview that there was "an individual whose name does not appear in the book at the specific request of the CIA. My rule in writing the book was when in doubt, leave it out. The last thing I wanted to do was to add another name" to the Book of Honor. Gup also mentioned that the "families [of the fallen] have told me that the publication of the book has given them a kind of peace and closure that was denied to them for many, many, many years."

Ironically, Hannity starts Chapter 2 of "Let Freedom Ring" ("The Left vs. The CIA") with a short biography praising CIA operative Mike Spann, his family and his sacrifice before going on to slam Ted Gup who had written a book that essentially tries to do the same thing in greater depth.

2.) The Mother Jones article, ">"Clueless in Langley", is cited by Hannity as evidence to back up his claim that "the Left" wants to "get rid of our most important intelligence organization". But if you read Gup's piece, you'll find that he says:

[T]he CIA is earnest enough but arguably so ill equipped and ill suited [for fighting terrorism] that nothing short of fundamentally altering its identity-the bureaucratic equivalent of knocking out its front teeth-would suffice. In short, it is time to consider either fundamentally overhauling the agency or getting rid of it entirely. We quite simply may no longer be able to entrust it with the vital mission of collecting and analyzing the intelligence upon which the nation's survival could depend.

Okay, would someone who wants (in Hannity's words) "to attack and undermine America's intelligence community" describe the "mission of collecting and analyzing...intelligence" as being a.) "vital" and b.) something "upon which the nation's survival could depend"? No. The fact is, Gup is saying that the war against terrorism requires a different kind of intelligence organization; one that's far-sighted and quick on its feet. And if the CIA can't retool itself to meet this mission, it must be replaced with one that can. So when he asks in the article if it's time to "get rid of the CIA", Gup doesn't mean abolishing the entire intelligence community (as Hannity insinuates), just making sure we have the right one for the job.

3.) What was the context in which Ted Gup asked the infamous question "Is it time to get rid of the CIA?" Interestingly enough, he was posing a question to Florida GOP Congressman Porter Goss, the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and himself a former CIA operative. Here's the question put in context:

Is it time to get rid of the CIA? "Now that's a fair question," Goss says. "If you ask me, 'Have you ever thought about changing the name, moving the building, putting up a different flag, calling it something else?' Yes, all of the above."

In his book, Hannity asks how "the liberals have the gall to ask such questions", yet when it had been posed (post-9/11) to Porter Goss his first response was "Now that's a fair question".

4.) The first paragraph of the extended quote, which Hannity said provided a "deeply disturbing...insight into the Left's mindset", basically says that some of the CIA's more questionable activities over the years have led to its being, in President Harry Truman's words, "interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue". How is that a "disturbing" observation?

Gup also alluded to some mysterious domestic intrigue, as well; citing such conspiracy theories as CIA involvement in the JFK assassination, as well as the "Dark Alliance" story of drug-trafficking for the Contras in South Central Los Angeles (a story Gup takes issue with in a Salon article). Conspiracy theories, as John Dean pointed out on page 116 of his book "Worse Than Watergate", are often the by-product of excessive secrecy; a condition we've already shown the CIA bureaucracy suffers from. Gup was trying to make the point that the CIA's reputation and penchant for secrecy have led to the rise of various urban legends. Hannity seems to miss the fact that the article goes on to say that these and other conspiracy theories "remain utterly unproved".

Simply stated, some of the things the CIA has done in the past were ill-advised and have led to its developing a less-than-sterling reputation, deserved or not, at home and abroad and this might hinder its efforts to find intelligence sources. Again, why is this disturbing?

5.) Hannity's conclusion after reading the second paragraph of the extended quote, was that Gup was calling the CIA a rogue agency. But if you look at the quote, you'll see it says the opposite. It starts out by saying that "Americans have long viewed the CIA as a rogue agency", but goes on to say in the very next sentence that "[t]he truth...is less comforting." Gup says that far from being a rogue, the CIA was acting on the orders of our government; and that we as citizens bear responsibility, at least in part, for the actions of the governments we elect (Civics 101).

6.) Hannity criticizes "liberals" who have the "gall" to ask whether the CIA needs to be abolished. Worse yet, they are asking it "[d]uring wartime", apparently making them even more reckless or worse.

My question is this: Is there ever a time when it is more critical to replace an failing agency with a vital role than wartime? It would be stupid to wait until the war was over before retooling things.

7.) Finally, on page 58 of "Let Freedom Ring" (a book written post-9/11, just like Gup's article), Hannity himself says that porous borders represent a national security risk and that "[f]or years, the INS [(U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service)] has been in desperate need of radical reform, or even outright abolition." (emphasis added) He goes on to claim that the Clinton Administration had done the nation a disservice by opposing restructuring of the INS during the 1990's.

In essence, Hannity is calling for the same kind of action with regard to the INS that Gup wrote about for the CIA: radical restructuring or outright replacement. Both are agencies whose missions are critical in this time of war, but Gup's suggestion is somehow less noble. Hannity pulls up just short of calling him an appeaser, a fool and a traitor.

* * *

All in all, today's excerpt has been shown to be totally without merit. I guess the big questions are: how did Hannity get it so totally wrong and how did it make it into the book? Weren't there any fact-checkers? He recognizes Joel C. Rosenberg in the Acknowledgements for his help in "the research and development of this book from the beginning and I'm deeply grateful for his...dedication to excellence." How is it, then, that I found everything I needed to debunk this particular excerpt in under 15 minutes? The final irony in all this is that Ted Gup quit Time magazine out of concern that the facts for stories weren't being properly checked, saying in his Salon article "Why the Time/CNN nerve-gas debacle was inevitable" that "[i]t was concerns over just these kinds of shoddy practices that led me to resign from Time in the fall of 1993." And Hannity accuses him of having "gall"?

Next time, we'll take a look at Hannity's second example of liberal treachery against the CIA and see if it can do better.

Later,

Mitch

"The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy", Part 1 of 6

Today's Excerpt for "Hannalysis":

"For decades, liberals and conservatives have been deeply divided over the importance of and the need for the CIA. Conservatives have long fought to strengthen and expand our intelligence services. Liberals have long sought to attack and undermine America's intelligence community." ("Let Freedom Ring" page 28-29)

This statement appears in Chapter 2, "The Left vs. The CIA", as the premise for the section ominously titled "The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy". There's no footnote, so I guess we're just supposed to take it on faith that Hannity knows what he's talking about. But let's have a closer look anyway.

1.) Have liberals "long sought to ... undermine America's intelligence community"? At the very height of the Cold War, one prominent liberal Democrat wrote an op-ed piece that appeared in the December 22, 1963 edition of the Washington Post that called for scaling back the CIA. He wrote that he "would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field — and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

"We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society", he continued. "There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it."

What does Sean Hannity have to say about this person? Hannity describes him as "a strong[,] old-school Democrat of the kind who would do his party a world of good today" ("Deliver Us From Evil", page 243). Who is this person? None other than Harry Truman.

Was Harry Truman a liberal seeking to "undermine America's intelligence community" with his suggestion to scale back the CIA? Not hardly. While Hannity says that the struggle over intelligence between liberals and conservatives has been going on "for decades", it must not go back to the 1940's when the CIA was established, because the president responsible for creating it was in fact that same Harry Truman, liberal Democrat.

So maybe it's possible to be a liberal, have issues with the CIA and still recognize the need for an effective intelligence service.

2.) Hannity's contention that conservatives have long been the CIA's friend doesn't exactly hold water, either. How is it that the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (created by hardliners as a way to gather raw intelligence on Iraqi WMD's, analyze it and "stovepipe" it to the Vice President's office) "strengthen[s] ... our intelligence services" when it was created specifically to circumvent them? Furthermore, the OSP's practice of relying on it's own sources (like Chalabi), to the exclusion of the CIA and other intelligence services, was hardly a conservative effort to "expand our intelligence services" so much as it was an effort to get the information they wanted to hear and not let the CIA get a chance to challenge it.

The OSP is not an isolated case of conservatives seeking to undermine the CIA over the years. In the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Anne Hessing Cahn wrote about conservative bitterness during the 1970's over "the CIA's realistic assessments during the Vietnam war years - assessments that failed to see light at the end of the tunnel" and their subsequent efforts to undermine the National Intelligence Estimates that weren't, in their view, sufficiently alarmist with regard to the Soviet threat.

In 1976, then CIA Director George H. W. Bush approved an experiment called "Team B", an ad hoc group that was staffed by hardliners (in fact, Paul Wolfowitz was on the Advisory Panel) to provide an alternative intelligence assessment to the NIE. But "Team B" quickly became an effort to undermine previous NIE's and call into question the CIA's reliance on "hard data" to reach it's conclusions rather than interpreting Soviet intentions through the writings of various Communist hardliners. As Amb. Joseph Wilson puts it, the "'Team B' effort resulted in the Reagan administration's use of wildly exaggerated claims about Soviet rearmament to justify huge American defense spending increases."

* * *

So the premise for this section of "Let Freedom Ring" already looks pretty shaky, but Hannity does go on to provide what he claims are concrete examples of liberal hostility towards the CIA. Since he's already asserted in the section title that the conspiracy against the CIA is "vast", we can assume, then, that there is a very great number of examples and that the few that he cites must be among the most egregious; the most irrefutably ironclad. We'll start "Hannalyzing" them next time.


Later,

Mitch