Mitch Krannert Online

"How Clinton and Gore Turned a Blind Eye to Terrorism", Part 4 of 4

2004-08-04T07:57:00.000-07:00

Executive Summary

Book: "Let Freedom Ring"
Chapter: "Civilization in the Balance"
Section: "How Clinton and Gore Turned a Blind Eye to Terrorism"

Accusation 1: Liberals resisted investigating the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11 because they knew it would expose dereliction of duty on the part of Clinton and Gore.

Here's an excerpt:

"[L]iberal Democrats...showed little interest in an investigation of the roots of this massive intelligence failure. (It was only after they smelled political advantage that they began to jump on the bandwagon.)...What might [Democrats]... fear that the American people might learn?...Maybe this: that the Clinton-Gore administration - starting with the president and the vice president themselves - had turned a blind eye to the growing threat posed to Americans by global terrorist networks. And it cost us. Big time." ("Let Freedom Ring" page 13-14)

Reality: A quick check of the New York Times uncovered an article which showed that rather than Democrats, it was the Republicans who initially resisted an investigation.

Accusation 2: A New York Times article details Clinton's failings in dealing with terrorism.

Reality: This is true. But it also detailed his successes and efforts to combat the growing terror threat. Whether Clinton did enough or not can be debated, but saying that he turned a blind eye to terrorism when they had done such things as authorize the killing of bin Laden and other al-Qaeda chiefs is inaccurate. The article also goes on to detail the Bush administration's failings, as well, saying at one point that "until Sept. 11, the people at the top levels of the Bush administration may, if anything, have been less preoccupied by terrorism than the Clinton aides."

Hannity cherry-picked the article for quotes that supported his pre-ordained conclusion.

Accusation 3: Dick Morris says Clinton didn't make terrorism a priority.

Reality: Dick Morris is described by Hannity as "[s]mart, clever, and now a Fox News consultant." Other people aren't so charitable.

Joe Conason of Salon and The New York Observer calls Morris "the political consultant and commentator who has ceaselessly prostituted himself to Fox News and other right-wing outlets for several years now."

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg refers to Morris as a "'trained seal'--a glib source who can be counted on to deliver an apposite quote to substantiate the thesis of any story."

More to the point, Weisberg goes on to say that "Morris' views are almost always totally worthless, because he obviously will say anything, to anybody."

Morris' lack of credibility is made worse by the fact that it was only after 9/11 that he started claiming to have warned Clinton about terrorism during his time at the White House (pretty much setting himself up as the lone voice of reason). Before 9/11, it was something he scarcely mentioned.

Hannity insinuates that Morris is one of several past Clinton advisors to have come forward with criticisms of how terrorism was handled. If that is truly the case, he should have quoted someone else.

Conclusion

The whole idea that liberals and Democrats resisted a 9/11 investigation is shown to be the opposite of what happened. The attempt to prove that Clinton turned a blind eye to terror falls flat, too, because there are examples given in the very sources Hannity cites that describe his and Gore's efforts to fight terrorism.

Hannity's assertions are false.

"How Clinton and Gore Turned a Blind Eye to Terrorism", Part 3 of 4

2004-08-01T20:20:00.000-07:00

After citing some quotes (out of context) from a New York Times article, Hannity continues along the line of argument that Clinton's advisors have started admitting that the Administration neglected the terror issue. After mentioning Stephanopolous, Hannity continues on to Dick Morris.

Here's an excerpt. Exhibit 2:

As time passes, other Clinton-Gore advisers and supporters are going on the record to describe just how uninterested the president and vice president really were in defending American citizens from the terrorist threat.

Dick Morris, for example. Smart, clever, and now a Fox News consultant, Morris has known Bill and Hillary Clinton for more than two decades. He worked with them during their political days in Arkansas. More recently, he was the chief political strategist for the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign in 1996. That put him at the epicenter of the Clintons' political lives. It now makes him a window into the soul of the Clintons for conservatives like me who otherwise wouldn't have gotten within a hundred miles of that White House inner sanctum.

In interviews over the past year on Hannity & Colmes and elsewhere, Morris has shed light on some very disturbing aspects of the Clinton-Gore approach to terrorism. It hasn't been pretty. But it has been instructive....What conclusion does the man who was once President Clinton's chief political strategist draw after observing these facts?

"Everything was more important [to Clinton] than fighting terrorism," says Morris. "Political correctness, civil liberties concerns, fear of offending the administration's supporters, Janet Reno's objections, considerations of cost, worries about racial profiling and, in the second term, surviving impeachment, all came before fighting terrorism." ("Let Freedom Ring" pages 14-16)

Hannity relies heavily on one source, Dick Morris, to prove his point about Clinton. Since the stuff that is described in today's excerpt is Morris' recollections of conversations he had with Clinton and others in the administration, I'm not sure if there will be any written record of it. So it comes down to the question: Is Morris credible? Let's take a look:

1.) Interestingly enough, Dick Morris was also quoted in the New York Times article "Planning for Terror But Failing to Act" we just looked at in Part 2 of this section's critique. Here's the quote:

In July 1996, shortly after Mr. bin Laden left Sudan, Mr. Clinton met at the White House with Dick Morris, his political adviser, to hone themes for his re-election campaign.

The previous month, a suicide bomber had detonated a truck bomb at a military barracks in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American servicemen. Days later, T.W.A. Flight 800 had exploded off Long Island, leaving 230 people dead in a crash that was immediately viewed as terrorism.

Mr. Morris said he had devised an attack advertisement of the sort that Senator Bob Dole, the Republican candidate, might use against Mr. Clinton and had shown it to a sampling of voters. Seven percent of those who saw it said they would switch from Mr. Clinton to Mr. Dole.

"Out of control. Two airline disasters. One linked to terrorism," the advertisement said. "F.A.A. asleep at the switch. Terror in Saudi Arabia." Mr. Morris said he told Mr. Clinton that he could neutralize such a line of attack by adopting tougher policies on terrorism and airport security. He said his polls had found support for tightening security and confronting terrorists. Voters favored military action against suspected terrorist installations in other countries. They backed a federal takeover of airport screening and even supported deployment of the military inside the United States to fight terrorism.

Mr. Morris said he tried and failed to persuade the president to undertake a broader war on terrorism.

The Times did try to get a response from Clinton with regard to Morris' allegations:

Mr. Clinton declined repeated requests for an interview, but a spokeswoman, Julia Payne, said: "Terrorism was always a top priority in the Clinton administration. The president chose to get his foreign policy advice from the likes of Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright and not Dick Morris."

Ouch.

Shortly after the New York Times article was published, columnist Joe Conason of Salon and The New York Observer wrote a piece in response titled "Media Blame Game Requires a Mirror" where at one point he criticizes the New York Times article as "an article that highlighted several paragraphs of preening recollection from Dick Morris."

Conason goes on to say that:

The indefatigable consultant evidently convinced the Times reporters that, based on polling done in 1996, he strenuously urged his Presidential client to federalize airport security and prosecute a "broader war on terrorism." Mr. Morris didn't reveal this prescient proposal anywhere in the 340-plus pages of Behind the Oval Office, his memoir of his years advising Mr. Clinton, which scarcely mentions terrorism at all.

If Mr. Morris did foresee the horrors to come five years ago, he was quite alone in his clairvoyance. More likely he is rewriting history to denigrate his old boss and inflate himself, an important duty of his current career. In truth, he has been heavily preoccupied during the past several years by smut and petty scandal, not by the looming "terrorist threat." And in those obsessions, he wasn't alone at all.

The fact that Morris only recently started telling this tale is an excellent point. In today's excerpt, Hannity says that Morris has been giving "interviews over the past year...on some very disturbing aspects of the Clinton-Gore approach to terrorism." Why was it only during "the past year", after 9/11, that this was something he mentioned?

2.) Has Morris been known to change his story before? Yes. Here's one example: Joe Conason quotes from Morris' 2003 article in the National Review where he claims that, in 1990, Bill Clinton tackled him and cocked back his fist to punch him (before Hillary Clinton interceded). Then Conason goes back to Morris' 1997 book where he says that "it's time to put the exaggerations to rest. By 1994, the story [about the Clinton run-in] had been transformed to the point that Clinton was supposed to have punched me." So, in 1997 at least, the idea of Clinton punching him was an "exaggeration."

Again, the 1997 version:

"Clinton charged up behind me as I stalked toward the door, grabbed me from behind, and wrapped his arms around me to stop me from leaving. I slipped to the floor. Hillary helped me to my feet....I relate the Arkansas incident here not because it seems relevant to his ability to serve in office but because it did affect our relationship and because it's time to put the exaggerations to rest. By 1994, the story had been transformed to the point that Clinton was supposed to have punched me."

and 2003:

"Bill ran after me, tackled me, threw me to the floor of the kitchen in the mansion and cocked his fist back to punch me. You [Hillary] grabbed his arm and, yelling at him to stop and get control of himself, pulled him off me."

3.) Are there those who question Dick Morris' credibility? Slate editor Jacob Weisberg says that:

Morris serves reporters by playing what they call a "trained seal"--a glib source who can be counted on to deliver an apposite quote to substantiate the thesis of any story. In a Washington Post story about how John Hilley, an administration official, was crucial to the budget deal, Morris offers: "Without him, there never would have been a budget deal. Literally." In an AP story about Al Gore's weaknesses as a successor to Bill Clinton: "He does the steps, but he doesn't hear the music." Part of Morris' appeal for journalists is that he is willing to teach it round or teach it flat to suit the needs of their stories. He will defend Clinton as a political genius and a man of integrity. But if the reporter wants him to say that Clinton signaled Janet Reno not to appoint an independent counsel, as the editors of National Review clearly did last April, he's happy to oblige. "Definitely, I think that happened," he told them. In a New York Times story about Clinton's disloyalty to subordinates, Morris offers: "There is a certain empirical truth to what [James] McDougal is saying. Just look at the carcasses." Never mind that Clinton was unaccountably loyal to Morris himself after his self-induced downfall.

...Morris' views are almost always totally worthless [my emphasis], because he obviously will say anything, to anybody. Though he used to pride himself on never being quoted in the press, he now scurries to return calls from the St. Louis Post Dispatch and Investor's Business Daily. Morris gets much more out of the transaction, in terms of selling copies of his book and putting ignominy behind him, than the readers of the papers that quote him do.

And if you don't think that's harsh, in a Slate book review scathingly titled "Lying All the Way to the Bank--Dick Morris' ridiculous memoirs" Weisberg also points out several inconsistencies in Morris' stories from when he was serving at the White House.

4.) Hannity refers to Morris as "smart" and "clever" (which he, no doubt, is). That reminded me of a line from the second Joe Conason article I cited here where Conason said that:

Conservatives can be quite gullible on the subject of the Clintons, as long as you're telling them the kind of nasty gossip they want to hear. Among the most tireless exploiters of this Clinton-hating credulity is Dick Morris, the political consultant and commentator who has ceaselessly prostituted himself to Fox News and other right-wing outlets for several years now.

5.) Today's excerpt started off with Hannity claiming:

As time passes, other Clinton-Gore advisers and supporters are going on the record to describe just how uninterested the president and vice president really were in defending American citizens from the terrorist threat.

Who are these people? Can he find anyone else besides Dick Morris? I didn't see anything out on the internet, though admittedly that's hardly the last word. While watching the 9/11 Commission's hearings recently, I don't remember any of Clinton's senior advisors peeling away during testimony and criticizing their former boss.

6.) A final strike against Morris is that he came to the Clinton Administration after the 1994 mid-term elections and was forced to resign in 1996 for, among other things, allowing his $200/hr. prostitute to listen in on his phone conversations with Clinton. The point being, he was only officially part of what Hannity calls the "inner sanctum" for two years at most in an eight-year administration and he left during the year that the CIA was really starting to get a handle on al Qaeda's scope for the first time. He was long gone when many of Clinton's anti-terror moves occurred (e.g., approving lethal force against bin Laden and dozens of others).

* * *

Surely Hannity must have known about Morris' reputation when he used him as a source (not about the prostitute but his credibility). If he was but one of several "Clinton-Gore advisers and supporters" who are criticizing the former president's anti-terror efforts, I think Hannity would have been better off using someone else.

"How Clinton and Gore Turned a Blind Eye to Terrorism", Part 2 of 4

2004-07-11T12:56:00.000-07:00

So far, we've looked at Hannity's contention that the Democrats were afraid an inquiry into 9/11 would lead to details of Clinton's failures in fighting terrorism coming to light and that they "showed little interest in an investigation" until "they smelled political advantage". That charge proved to be without merit.

Now we're going to start looking at the other charge Hannity levels in this section: Clinton refused to see the terrorist threat for what it was and this helped make the 9/11 attacks possible. Like the section's title, Hannity going to show "How Clinton and Gore Turned a Blind Eye to Terrorism".

Let's review Hannity's evidence. Here's "Exhibit 1":

On December 20, 2001, New York Times reporters Judith Miller, Jeff Gerth, and Don Van Natta, Jr., wrote a 7,237-word story titled "Planning for Terror But Failing to Act." The story detailed how the Clinton-Gore administration did little or nothing to crack down on terrorism in the wake of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

The Times story revealed that "in 1996, a State Department dossier spelled out Mr. bin Laden's operation and his anti-American intentions. But Clinton chose not to act." The Times reported that "in 2000, after an Algerian was caught coming into the country with explosives, a secret White House review recommended a crackdown on 'potential sleeper cells in the United States.' That review warned that 'the threat of attack remains high' and laid out a plan for fighting terrorism. But most of that plan remained undone."

The Times even quoted former Clinton senior advisor George Stephanopolous admitting that the Clinton-Gore administration never gave much attention to protecting the American people from bin Laden and his ilk, despite the growing number of deaths of innocent Americans at the hands of al Qaeda operatives.

"It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked into a staff meeting and people asked, what are we doing today in the war against terrorism?" said Stephanopolous.

To which I ask: Why not?

Why were issues like gays in the military and global warming and promoting race-based set-asides more important to the Clinton-Gore administration that waging a war against terrorism? ("Let Freedom Ring" pages 13-14)

I'm assuming Hannity made a point of mentioning that the article was 7,237 words in order to leave the reader with the impression that there were lots of examples of Clinton's negligence in it. To find out, I read the New York Times article for myself. Let's take a look at some of what it said:

1.) Here's an interesting quote from the article:

[U]ntil Sept. 11, the people at the top levels of the Bush administration may, if anything, have been less preoccupied by terrorism than the Clinton aides.

Hmm. That sounds a lot like the Bush Administration wasn't making terrorism its top priority either, rather it was even lower on the list than it had been with the Clinton Administration. By the way, that quote came from the section titled "The New Team, Seeing the Threat But Moving Slowly". Here's the quote in context:

As he prepared to leave office last January, [Clinton's National Security Advisor, Sandy] Berger met with his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and gave her a warning.

According to both of them, he said that terrorism -- and particularly Mr. bin Laden's brand of it -- would consume far more of her time than she had ever imagined.

A month later, with the administration still getting organized, Mr. Tenet, whom President Bush had asked to stay on at the C.I.A., warned the Senate Intelligence Committee that Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda remained "the most immediate and serious threat" to security. But until Sept. 11, the people at the top levels of the Bush administration may, if anything, have been less preoccupied by terrorism than the Clinton aides.

So the article isn't just about Clinton. It covers Bush, too. Hannity never mentions that.

2.) Probably worse than neglecting to mention the fact that Bush is also the subject of the article, is the fact that there is an entire section titled "The Battle Intensifies, Struggling to Track 'Enemy No. 1'" (that being bin Laden) that never gets mentioned either. Why is that so bad? Read some of it for yourself:

In the years after the [African] embassy bombings, the Clinton administration significantly stepped up its efforts to destroy Al Qaeda, tracking its finances, plotting military strikes to wipe out its leadership and prosecuting its members for the bombings and other crimes. "From August 1998, bin Laden was Enemy No. 1," [National Security Advisor] Mr. Berger said.

The campaign had the support of President Clinton and his senior aides. But former administration officials acknowledge that it never became the government's top priority.

When it came to Pakistan, for example, American diplomats continued to weigh the war on terrorism against other pressing issues, including the need to enlist Islamabad's help in averting a nuclear exchange with India.

Similarly, a proposal to vastly enhance the Treasury Department's ability to track global flows of terrorist money languished until after Sept. 11. And American officials were reluctant to press the oil-rich Saudis to crack down on charities linked to radical causes.

Still, the fight against Al Qaeda gained new, high-level attention after the embassy attacks, present and former officials say. Between 1998 and 2000, the "Small Group" of the Cabinet-rank principals involved in national security met almost every week on terrorism, and the Counterterrorism Security Group, led by Mr. [Richard] Clarke, met two or three times a week, officials said.

The United States disrupted some Qaeda cells, and persuaded friendly intelligence services to arrange the arrest and transfer of Al Qaeda members without formal extradition or legal proceedings. Dozens were quietly sent to Egypt and other countries to stand trial.

President Clinton also ordered a more aggressive program of covert action, signing an intelligence order that allowed him to use lethal force against Mr. bin Laden. Later, this was expanded to include as many as a dozen of his top lieutenants, officials said.

On at least four occasions, Mr. Clinton sent the C.I.A. a secret "memorandum of notification," authorizing the government to kill or capture Mr. bin Laden and, later, other senior operatives. The C.I.A. then briefed members of Congress about those plans.

The C.I.A. redoubled its efforts to track Mr. bin Laden's movements, stationing submarines in the Indian Ocean to await the president's launch order. To hit Mr. bin Laden, the military said it needed to know where he would be 6 to 10 hours later -- enough time to review the decision in Washington and program the cruise missiles.

That search proved frustrating. Officials said the C.I.A. did have some spies within Afghanistan. On at least three occasions between 1998 and 2000, the C.I.A. told the White House it had learned where Mr. bin Laden was and where he might soon be.

Each time, Mr. Clinton approved the strike. Each time, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, called the president to say that the information was not reliable enough to be used in an attack, a former senior Clinton administration official said.

...Officials said the White House pushed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop plans for a commando raid to capture or kill Mr. bin Laden. But the chairman, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, and other senior Pentagon officers told Mr. Clinton's top national security aides that they would need to know Mr. bin Laden's whereabouts 12 to 24 hours in advance.

Pentagon planners also considered a White House request to send a hunter team of commandos, small enough to avoid detection, the officer said. General Shelton discounted this option as naïve, the officer said.

White House officials were frustrated that the Pentagon could not produce plans that involved a modest number of troops. Military planners insisted that an attack on Al Qaeda required thousands of troops invading Afghanistan. "When you said this is what it would take, no one was interested," a senior officer said.

A former administration official recently defended the decision not to employ a commando strike. "It would have been an assault without the kind of war we've seen over the last three months to support it," the official said. "And it would have been very unlikely to succeed."

Clinton administration officials also began trying to choke off Al Qaeda's financial network. Shortly after the embassy bombings, the United States began threatening states and financial institutions with sanctions if they failed to cut off assistance to those who did business with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In 1999 and early 2000, some $255 million of Taliban-controlled assets was blocked in United States accounts, according to William F. Wechsler, a former White House official.

Mr. Wechsler said the search for Al Qaeda's assets was often stymied by poor cooperation from Middle Eastern and South Asian states.

The United States, too, he added, had problems. "Few intelligence officials who understand the nuances of the global banking system" were fluent in Arabic. While the C.I.A. had done a "reasonably good job" analyzing Al Qaeda, he wrote, it was "poor" at developing sources within Mr. bin Laden's financial network. The F.B.I., he argued, had similar shortcomings.

Senior officials were frustrated by the C.I.A.'s inability to find hard facts about Al Qaeda's financial operations.

Intelligence officials said the C.I.A. had amassed considerable detail about the group's finances, and that information was used in the broad efforts to freeze its accounts after Sept. 11.

Sounds like Clinton was taking the terror threat pretty seriously. Whether he was doing enough or not I'll leave for others to decide, but he was most definitely not turning a blind eye to the problem. If Hannity read the article, surely he must have realized this.

3.) Here's another interesting quote from the article:

When it came to terrorism, Clinton administration officials continued the policy of their predecessors, who had viewed it primarily as a crime to be solved and prosecuted by law enforcement agencies.

Those "predecessors" would be Bush Sr. and Ronald Reagan. So the policy of treating terrorism as a law enforcement problem did not originate with Clinton. That's significant because it has become a talking point for many in the GOP.

4.) In today's excerpt, Hannity says:

The Times story revealed that "in 1996, a State Department dossier spelled out Mr. bin Laden's operation and his anti-American intentions. But Clinton chose not to act."

But, when I read the article, here's what I found:

In 1996, a State Department dossier spelled out Mr. bin Laden's operation and his anti-American intentions. And President Bill Clinton's own pollster[(I'm assuming this was Dick Morris)] told him the public would rally behind a war on terrorism. But none was declared.

That's a misquote.

5.) Hannity concludes today's excerpt with the question "Why were issues like gays in the military and global warming and promoting race-based set-asides more important to the Clinton-Gore administration that waging a war against terrorism?"

Hannity was most likely just finishing with a rhetorical flourish but, as luck would have it, the priorities of the Clinton-Gore administration are, in fact, listed in the Times article. So let's have a look and see what they were:

Leon E. Panetta, the former congressman who was budget director and later chief of staff during Mr. Clinton's first term, said senior aides viewed terrorism as just one of many pressing global problems.

"Clinton was aware of the threat and sometimes he would mention it," Mr. Panetta said. But the "big issues" in the president's first term, he said, were "Russia, Eastern bloc, Middle East peace, human rights, rogue nations and then terrorism."

While gays in the military could be construed as a human rights issue, I think Panetta was talking about countries' treatment of their citizenry. Global warming was definitely never mentioned. So terrorism was higher on the list.

6.) Hannity said:

The Times even quoted former Clinton senior advisor George Stephanopolous admitting that the Clinton-Gore administration never gave much attention to protecting the American people from bin Laden and his ilk, despite the growing number of deaths of innocent Americans at the hands of al Qaeda operatives.

"It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked into a staff meeting and people asked, what are we doing today in the war against terrorism?" said Stephanopolous.

To which I ask: Why not?

Now doesn't that leave you with the impression that Stephanopolous was talking about terrorism in general? Here's the Stephanopolous quote again, only this time it's in context, as it appeared in the New York Times article:

Looking back, George Stephanopoulos, the president's adviser for policy and strategy in his first term, said he believed the 1993 [World Trade Center] attack did not gain more attention because, in the end, it "wasn't a successful bombing."

He added: "It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked into a staff meeting and people asked, what are we doing today in the war against terrorism?"

Two years later, however, terrorism moved to the forefront of the national agenda when a truck bomb tore into the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people.

So Stephanopolous was actually talking about was one incident (albeit a significant one) and explaining the administration's reaction to it. It hardly justifies Hannity's line that Stephanopolous was "admitting that the Clinton-Gore administration never gave much attention to protecting the American people from bin Laden and his ilk."

* * *

Hannity was very selective in his use of quotes in this article and, I feel, distorts the overall point its authors were trying to make.

Let's play the same game. I'll take today's excerpt and substitute in different quotes from the same article Hannity cited, change the names from Clinton to Bush officials and "prove" the opposite argument; that Bush turned a blind eye to terrorism before 9/11. Here's the re-worded excerpt:

On December 20, 2001, New York Times reporters Judith Miller, Jeff Gerth, and Don Van Natta, Jr., wrote a 7,237-word story titled "Planning for Terror But Failing to Act." The story detailed how the Bush-Cheney administration did little or nothing to crack down on terrorism despite warnings from the outgoing Clinton Administration.

The Times story revealed that "Mr. Bush's principals did not formally meet to discuss terrorism in late spring when intercepts from Afghanistan warned that Al Qaeda was planning to attack an American target in late June or perhaps over the July 4 holiday." The Times reported that "They did not meet even after intelligence analysts overheard conversations from a Qaeda cell in Milan suggesting that Mr. bin Laden's agents might be plotting to kill Mr. Bush at the European summit meeting in Genoa, Italy, in late July."

The Times even quoted former Bush director of counterterrorism Richard Clarke admitting that the Bush-Cheney administration never gave much attention to protecting the American people from bin Laden and his ilk, despite the growing number of deaths of innocent Americans at the hands of al Qaeda operatives.

"Democracies don't prepare well for things that have never happened before", said Clarke.

To which I ask: Why not?

Why were issues like faith-based initiatives and privatizing Social Security more important to the Bush-Cheney administration that waging a war against terrorism?

Hopefully, this little exercise shows that cherry-picking an article for quotes that back your pre-ordained conclusion, to the exclusion of any contrary information, is intellectually dishonest. Today's excerpt is a complete sham.

So far, Hannity has not only failed to prove the idea that the Clinton Administration turned a blind eye to terrorism, his own source material has provided the information to prove the opposite. But Hannity has one more arrow in his quiver. He continues along the line of argument that Clinton's advisors have admitted to the Administration neglecting the terror issue. After mentioning Stephanopolous, Hannity continues on to Dick Morris. We'll take a look at "Exhibit 2" next time.

"How Clinton and Gore Turned a Blind Eye to Terrorism", Part 1 of 4

2004-06-29T21:38:00.000-07:00

"How Clinton and Gore Turned a Blind Eye to Terrorism" is a pretty accusingly titled section.

Here's the first excerpt:

In the weeks and months following September 11, Americans began asking hard questions. Wasn't there any way these attacks could have been prevented? Why didn't the CIA know what was coming? How could we spend billions of dollars on intelligence and have such a massive failure?

After all, the rising threat of global terrorism - particularly the threat of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network - had been clear to U.S. policy-makers for years from the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, to the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa, to the suicide attack on the USS Cole in the fall of 2000.

From the beginning, President Bush expressed the outrage of the American people. He immediately took charge; there was no mistaking who was commander in chief. He made it clear that his first priority would be to hunt down the evildoers and bring them to justice. He and his team also made it clear that determining the causes of America's security failures and finding and remedying its weak points would be central to their mission. Other Republicans concurred.

"I absolutely believe that we have to go back and see what happened," said Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, on NBC's Meet the Press just one month after the attacks. He stressed the importance of determining what went wrong "so that we will not make the mistakes again that we made before and can reorganize our intelligence services."

Curiously, however, liberal Democrats - many of whom historically criticized, attacked, and sought to defund the CIA - at first showed little interest in an investigation of the roots of this massive intelligence failure. (It was only after they smelled political advantage that they began to jump on the bandwagon.)

"We don't need a witch hunt now, or certainly not next year in an election year," Representative Jane Harman, a California Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told the New York Times.

A witch hunt? That's pretty strong language. What might Representative Harman fear that the American people might learn - especially "in an election year"?

Maybe this: that the Clinton-Gore administration - starting with the president and vice president themselves - had turned a blind eye to the growing threat posed to Americans by global terrorist networks. And it cost us. Big time. ("Let Freedom Ring" pages 12-13)

Wow! So Hannity is contending that (1) Clinton refused to see the terrorist threat for what it was and this helped make the 9/11 attacks possible (2) Congressional Democrats realized this and sought to keep it quiet. Those are some pretty serious charges. Let's see if they hold up to scrutiny.

I'm going to work backwards and look first at the contention that the Democrats opposed an investigation into the causes of 9/11.

1.) Were Rep. Harman and other Democrats afraid that the an inquiry was going to go back and dig up some dirt on Clinton? If that were the case then they would fight any attempt to look back and investigate anything preceding 9/11, right? Maybe they would try to weaken any proposed commission or give it a mandate to only investigate intel after 9/11. Yet, the opposite was true.

An article in the New York Times entitled "House Votes for More Spy Aid and to Pull in Reins on Inquiry"* said that:

House members of both parties described an urgent need to change the culture of agencies that grew out of the long struggle with the Soviet Union.

"A community built on cold war priorities was ill prepared to meet the challenges of the 21st century," said Representative Jane Harman, Democrat of California. "On Sept. 11 everything and everyone changed."

But just days after the intelligence committee included in the bill an independent commission with subpoena powers that would be empowered to investigate the government's inability to forecast or prevent the attacks, Republicans moved to scale back the commission's powers and mission. Many said that as the nation braced for a long struggle against terrorism it was not a time to cast blame.

[Republican Porter] Goss [of Florida] proposed an amendment, which passed by voice vote, to strip the commission of subpoena powers and the right to grant immunity, and change its focus to an examination of structural impediments to the collection, analysis and sharing of intelligence information....Mr. Goss said that by looking forward to how procedures could be changed, the commission would "focus on the future" and "get away from the blame game." His amendment prompted the first partisan exchanges of the debate.

Democrats, who offered their own amendment, continued to push for a commission that would examine the events leading up to Sept. 11 and the failure to stop the attacks. They also objected to restricting membership to people with backgrounds in the government agencies under scrutiny.

"It is not about finger-pointing," said Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the senior Democrat on the intelligence committee. "Unless we know how we got to where we are now, it seems it will be more difficult to prevent these acts of terrorism."

But the Democrats did not push the dispute to a recorded vote.

Why the Democrats didn't "push the dispute to a recorded vote", I don't know. What I do know, however, is that it sounds an awful lot like it was Porter Goss and the Republicans, at least in the House, who were fighting the idea of looking for answers back before 9/11. Attempts to take away the commission's subpoena powers were also a GOP initiative.

On the Senate side, Democrat Joe Lieberman said an inquiry "ought to tell the president and us to the best of their ability what went wrong, so we can make sure it never happens again." So the idea that Democrats were trying to squelch an investigation looks to be a false charge.

2.) Interestingly enough, both the Jane Harman and John McCain quotes Hannity cites come from the same New York Times article, "Lawmakers Seek Inquiry into Intelligence Failures"**. Hannity cut out the middle of the McCain quote. It's the part where he says that the purpose of an inquiry is "not in order to hang somebody at the yardarm or to disgrace anyone". That sounds vaguely like the sentiments expressed by Harman: a desire to avoid a "witch hunt".

Here's the "witch hunt" quote in context:

[Democratic Senator Joe] Lieberman said Sunday that members of Congress should not be the ones to carry out any inquiry. "It ought to be citizens," he said. "A lot of their meetings ought to be in private. But then they ought to tell the president and us to the best of their ability what went wrong, so we can make sure it never happens again."

McCain proposed that former Sens. Warren Rudman (R-N.H.) and Gary Hart (D-Colo.) could run an inquiry. The two headed an earlier commission on national security that had warned that the nation was ill-prepared to face the terrorist threat of the new century.

Many lawmakers on the intelligence committee, however, argue that this is precisely their role and their duty. "Farming this out to other groups, I think, is inappropriate," Harman said. "I think we should do it in private and public."

Aware of how explosive the subject could become, she added, "We don't need a witch hunt now, or certainly not next year in an election year."

I think her point was the same as McCain's: In the wake of 9/11, looking for someone to make a scapegoat out of would be counterproductive to the mission at hand (i.e., getting the intel community on the right track). And when she said "[w]e don't need a witch hunt now", the "now" she was referring to was just over a month after September 11th, with the rubble still smouldering and the memory of the attacks fresh in everyone's heads. Definitely not a time for partisanship. I'm assuming that a desire to avoid "finger-pointing" is one reason why she is suggesting that some meetings be held in private. I also think that when taken in context, it's obvious that Harman was not objecting to an investigation, merely arguing over what form the investigation should take.

The insinuation that she fears what an investigation would turn up and therefore labels it a "witch hunt" in order to pre-emptively discredit it's findings was a distortion of the quote's true meaning.

3.) How does Hannity's assertion that Bush "and his team also made it clear that determining the causes of America's security failures and finding and remedying its weak points would be central to their mission" hold up to scrutiny? Not well.

First, there was going to be a joint House-Senate committee investigation. According to the CNN article "Bush asks Daschle to limit Sept. 11 probes":

President Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle Tuesday to limit the congressional investigation into the events of September 11, congressional and White House sources told CNN.

The request was made at a private meeting with congressional leaders Tuesday morning. Sources said Bush initiated the conversation.

He asked that only the House and Senate intelligence committees look into the potential breakdowns among federal agencies that could have allowed the terrorist attacks to occur, rather than a broader inquiry that some lawmakers have proposed, the sources said.

Tuesday's discussion followed a rare call to Daschle from Vice President Dick Cheney last Friday to make the same request.

"The vice president expressed the concern that a review of what happened on September 11 would take resources and personnel away from the effort in the war on terrorism," Daschle told reporters....Although the president and vice president told Daschle they were worried a wide-reaching inquiry could distract from the government's war on terrorism, privately Democrats questioned why the White House feared a broader investigation to determine possible culpability.

This request to Daschle is also mentioned by John Dean in his book "Worse than Watergate". Here's a passage where Dean offers his ideas as to why the Administration wanted to limit the investigations:

Given the dimensions of the government's failure, it was inevitable that several congressional committees, in both the House and Senate, quickly expressed plans to investigate. But this was exactly what Cheney wanted to avoid. With the Democrats in control of the Senate and the Republicans in control of the House, the White House had only partial control over Congress. Working behind the scenes, however, Cheney was able to do what a White House does when it does not want to be investigated - stop the process by jamming the gears of government.

Both Bush and Cheney spoke with Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle in late January 2002 about the probes. The Washington Post reported that the "president said the inquiry should be limited to the House and Senate intelligence committees, whose proceedings are generally secret" and that Cheney told Daschle, "A review of what happened on September 11 would take the resources and personnel away from the effort in the war on terrorism." It was not a viable excuse to forestall an investigation. When they failed to block the congressional inquiry, Bush and Cheney next used their political influence to control it.

Cheney employed well-proven tactics....First Daschle and then the House Republican leadership agreed (out of concern for "national security") to permit only the intelligence committees to investigate 9/11. Then to further limit those inquiries and prevent separate investigations by the House and Senate intelligence committees, an "unprecedented" (only because Democrats controlled one house of Congress, Republicans the other) joint committee was formed by combining the two committees. With thirty-seven members constituting the joint inquiry, the impact of the investigation was immediately weakened. Cheney understood that all members of such a high-profile undertaking would jealously seek to be involved, which dilutes the effort. For example, the time allotted to any single member for questioning witnesses must be limited, so everyone gets his turn, and the staff cannot assist three dozen plus members as it can a few. And reaching agreement on anything is difficult with such expanded membership, not to mention mixing the House and Senate together. In short, such large joint committees are remarkably cumbersome and poor at investigations, and for that reason they are rarely used....Finally, since all the information was controlled by the executive branch (i.e., the White House) and much of it subject to national security classification, Bush and Cheney could - and did - control what would be provided to the joint inquiry. The committee would get only what Bush and Cheney wanted it to get.

...The White House took an unprecedented stance in refusing to permit either Don Rumsfeld, as secretary of defense, or Colin Powell, as secretary of state, from testifying about matters relating to pre-9/11 counterterrorism activities. ("Worse than Watergate, pages 111 - 113)

The results from the joint committee***:

One panelist, Tim Roemer, a Democrat who just retired from Congress, complained in a statement he issued last month as a member of the House-Senate panel that the congressional probe suffered because such officials as Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, John Ashcroft and Condoleezza Rice "were not questioned directly about issues related to the Sept. 11 attacks."...Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, a key architect of the legislation forming the commission, said the Bush Administration "slow-walked and stonewalled" the House-Senate inquiry.

A New York Times article on the congressional committee titled "White House Drags Its Feet On Testifying At 9/11 Panel"* seems to back up McCain's comments. In this case Sen. Richard Shelby, another Republican committee member, is quoted:

But Senator Shelby also warned that the committee was running out of time to finish its job, and indicated that he believes Bush administration officials have delayed cooperating fully, knowing it has a deadline to meet.

"We were told that there would be cooperation in this investigation, and I question that," he said. He added that he believes that the joint panel may run out of time, and that an independent commission to investigate the terrorist attacks may be needed to fill in the gaps.

Next up, the independent 9/11 Commission. To again quote John Dean:

Because of the lack of White House cooperation with the joint inquiry, the families of 9/11 victims began lobbying Congress to create an independent commission, with subpoena power, to investigate 9/11, even before the congressional effort had been completed. Bush and Cheney, of course, objected. ("Worse than Watergate, page 113)

The Administration's treatment of the independent commission is described in "Administration Faces Subpoenas From 9/11 Panel"****:

The chairman of the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks [Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey,] said that the White House was continuing to withhold several highly classified intelligence documents from the panel and that he was prepared to subpoena the documents if they were not turned over within weeks....

Mr. Kean's comments on Friday came as another member of the commission, Max Cleland, the former Democratic senator from Georgia, became the first panel member to say publicly that the commission could not complete its work by its May 2004 deadline and the first to accuse the White House of withholding classified information from the panel for purely political reasons.

"It's obvious that the White House wants to run out the clock here," he said in an interview in Washington. "It's Halloween, and we're still in negotiations with some assistant White House counsel about getting these documents - it's disgusting." [NOTE: This sounds very similar to Sen. Shelby's comments above regarding the congressional committee.]

He said that the White House and President Bush's re-election campaign had reason to fear what the commission was uncovering in its investigation of intelligence and law enforcement failures before Sept. 11. "As each day goes by, we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before Sept. 11 than it has ever admitted."

Interviews with several other members of the commission show that Mr. Kean's concerns are widely shared on the panel, and that the concern is bipartisan.

Slade Gorton, a Republican member of the panel who served in the Senate from Washington from 1982 to 2000, said that he was startled by the "indifference" of some executive branch agencies in making material available to the commission. "This lack of cooperation, if it extends anywhere else, is going to make it very difficult" for the commission to finish its work by next May, he said.

Timothy J. Roemer, president of the Center for National Policy in Washington and a former Democratic member of the House from Indiana, said that "our May deadline may, in fact, be jeopardized - many of us are frustrated that we're still dealing with questions about document access when we should be sinking our teeth into hearings and to making recommendations for the future."

Congress would need to approve an extension if the panel requested one, a potentially difficult proposition given the reluctance of the White House and many senior Republican lawmakers to see the commission created in the first place.

"If the families of the victims weighed in - and heavily, as they did before - then we'd have a chance of succeeding," said Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who was an important sponsor of the legislation creating the commission. He said that, given the "obfuscation" of the administration in meeting document requests, he was ready to pursue an extension "if the commission feels it can't get its work done."

Sadly, I could go on. Remember how hard it was to get Condi Rice to testify under oath after Richard Clark's testimony? They claim they have their reasons (national security, for example), but the result, nevertheless, is that the Bush Administration's actions (or lack of action) have hampered efforts by the 9/11 commission to "determin[e] the causes of America's security failures and [find] and [remedy] its weak points" and this runs counter to Hannity's claim. Hannity, once again, is wrong.

4.) When Hannity said "[o]ther Republicans concurred" with Bush, did he mean that they concurred with Bush on just an investigation or was he also including the previous statement about hunting down the guilty parties, too? Hannity said that Bush "made it clear that his first priority would be to hunt down the evildoers and bring them to justice". Was there an insinuation that the Democrats didn't concur? Just in case there was, here's a rebuttal:

In a statement on September 12, 2001, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a Democrat and a liberal, said that "[t]he world should know that the members of both parties, in both houses, stand united in this: the full resources of our government will be brought to bear ...in hunting down those responsible, and those who may have aided or harbored them."

What about a commitment to defending America? Were the Democrats on board? In the October 22 article Hannity cited, in addition to the "witch hunt" remark, Jane Harman is also quoted as saying: "Protecting against the next waves [of terror attacks] is job No. 1, job No. 2 and job No. 3." So, it wasn't just the GOP that concurred with the president.

* * *

I think that at this point it's pretty clear that Hannity's assertions about liberal Democrats, as a rule, being against investigating the intelligence community until it was politically advantageous (whenever that would have been) are false.

We're working backwards, so the next assertion to tackle is if Clinton refused to recognize terrorism for what it was (and thus effectively helped bring about 9/11). We'll look at that next time.

*This is a "pay-per-view" article on the New York Times' web site.

**This is a free version of the New York Times article that appears on the Chicago Tribunes web site.

***This is a free version of a Time article that appears on the "SkyScraperSafety" web site.

****This is a free version of the New York Times article that appears on the "GlobalIssues.org" web site.

"Political Expediency"

2004-06-21T19:50:00.000-07:00

Let's "Hannalyze" the section called "Political Expediency" from Chapter 8 ("I'm Pro-Choice") of "Let Freedom Ring".

Hannity starts off the section by saying:

A good rule of thumb to help determine the relative righteousness of one side in a debate over the other is to check their respect for openness and truth. If one side is less than forthcoming about its positions or tries to disguise it in euphemistic language, you ought to be suspicious about the virtue of their cause. Truth has nothing to hide. Let me illustrate the point with a little quiz. The answers might surprise you.

Okay, my take on this section is that he's going to show how people "hem and haw" around when they have an indefensible position. This chapter is on abortion, so I'm assuming the indefensible position to be discussed is the "pro-choice" position. But is it?

Hannity goes on to ask the first multiple choice question of his quiz:

Who said, "I am opposed to abortion and to government funding of abortions"?

a. Pat Robertson

b. Jerry Falwell

c. Bill Clinton

Of course, the answer turns out to be Bill Clinton. However, Hannity doesn't give an example of Clinton being less than forthcoming on the issue or using "euphemistic language" to explain his position, which he had just said was what we should look for to determine the "relative righteousness of one side". Hannity merely states that Clinton was once "pro-life" and is now so "pro-choice" that he vetoed a ban on partial birth abortions.

So Clinton flip-flopped. If memory serves, Jimmy Carter did, too. Hannity blames this on political expediency: Democrats with presidential aspirations changing positions to appeal to the party base.

Republicans have done it, too, though. Let me illustrate the point with a little quiz of my own. The answers might surprise you.

Which president, while still a governor signed the "Therapeutic Abortion Act of 1967", decriminalizing abortion in their state years before Roe v. Wade?

a. Bill Clinton

b. Jimmy Carter

c. Ronald Reagan

If you guessed C-Ronald Reagan, you'd be right. An article appearing in the Chicago Sun-Times recently described the bill Reagan signed as "allowing abortion in cases of rape and incest or to protect the mother's mental and physical health". It became law in California years ahead of Roe v. Wade. This is not to say that Reagan was enthusiastic about it. An article by Tom Curry on MSNBC.com said that "Reagan agonized over the measure, fearing that doctors would exploit a mental heath loophole to approve many abortions. But in the end he signed it."

Of course, back in those days, abortion wasn't the polarizing political issue that it has become. Fred Barnes said in a 2003 opinion piece that:

Even here [in the U.S.], full-throated conservative opposition to abortion is a relatively recent phenomenon....The most telling example of conservative indifference to the abortion issue [in decades past] occurred in California. At the time, Mr. Reagan was troubled by the passionate lobbying against the bill by Cardinal Francis McIntyre. But on the advice of two of his most conservatives advisers, Ed Meese and Lyn Nofziger, Mr. Reagan signed anyway. He persuaded himself that the measure would have little impact. Instead, it prompted a surge in abortions.

Apparently (when not looking through an ideological filter like a conservative would do today) Reagan, while not comfortable with what he saw as a "mental health loophole" in the bill, must have seen some merit in the other reasons justifying a "therapeutic abortion" (rape, incest or to protect the physical health of the mother) or he wouldn't have signed it. Again, whatever Reagan's reasons for signing the bill, whatever gave him doubts, he nevertheless did sign it. While some politicians talk about "a woman's right to choose", Reagan actually signed a bill into law that "prompted a surge in abortions" and later when running for president billed himself as "pro-life". At the end of this section, Hannity derides politicians who became "pro-choice" when they decided to run for president. But one statement stands out. Hannity says that he realizes "that at times politicians feel they have to adjust or change their positions to be successful. But it's completely reprehensible for them to do so with respect to a fundamental moral issue." However, didn't Reagan do an about-face in this case, or at least "adjust" his position as Hannity put it?

Hannity continues with his quiz:

Who once voted for civil rights legislation defining an unborn baby from the moment of conception as "a person"?

a. Jesse Helms

b. Henry Hyde

c. Al Gore

Of course, the answer is Al Gore. In this case, Hannity quotes a Michael Kramer article* in the March 7, 1988 edition of U.S. News and World Report where Gore's advisors admitted to trying to obfuscate Gore's long "pro-life" voting record (a position unpopular with the national party's base). Their strategy? "In effect, what we have to do is deny, deny, deny."

Again, jumping to the end of the section, Hannity sums thing up by saying that Gore and others in the Democratic Party either "never believed in their earlier stated moral position, or their lust for high office overpowered their moral convictions. In either case, their conduct is deceitful."

Okay, my turn again.

Who once said they opposed a pro-life amendment to the Constitution and favored leaving the abortion question up to a woman and her doctor?

a. Tom Daschle

b. Edward Kennedy

c. George W. Bush

Yep, it was Dubya who said it while running for Congress back in 1978. Here's the quote in context from an article by David Corn:

In 1978, Bush, a 31-year-old oilman, was seeking the Republican nomination in Texas' 19th Congressional District, which included Midland, Odessa and Lubbock. He was locked in a fierce battle with Jim Reese, a veteran campaigner and Reagan Republican. Days before the June 3 primary runoff, Bush was interviewed by a reporter for the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. Reese had attacked Bush for being cozy with liberal Rockefeller Republicans. In response, Bush listed conservative positions he held. "I'm not for the extension of the time to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment," he told the paper. "I feel the ERA is unnecessary. I'm not for the federal funding of abortions. I've done nothing to promote homosexuality in our society." But he went on to explain his view on abortion. The Avalanche-Journal reported: "Bush said he opposes the pro-life amendment favored by Reese and favors leaving up to a woman and her doctor the abortion question. 'That does not mean I'm for abortion,' he said."

So, Bush opposed the main goal of the antiabortion movement, a constitutional amendment banning abortion, which the GOP had endorsed. Moreover, he echoed the language of abortion-rights supporters: Abortion is a matter best left to a woman and her doctor.

Now, let's go back to the main premise of this section where Hannity says that "[i]f one side is less than forthcoming about its positions or tries to disguise it in euphemistic language, you ought to be suspicious about the virtue of their cause." Hannity had said that a "good rule of thumb to help determine the relative righteousness of one side in a debate over the other is to check their respect for openness and truth", so let's see what the Bush campaign's response was when confronted by Corn:

On the day the story [of Bush's abortion statements from the 1978 campaign] was to go to press, I called the Bush press office at 8:00 a.m, Austin time. I explained to a press aide that I had unearthed this article and needed a reply from the campaign by noon. Someone will get back to you, she told me. Fifteen minutes later, she called and asked me to fax her the Lubbock newspaper article. I did so, and less than a hour later, the Bush campaign telephoned with a response.

"We consider this a misinterpretation," spokesman Dan Bartlett said. "He is prolife. He was always opposed to abortion." You're saying, I remarked, that the reporter got it wrong? "We're saying this is a misinterpretation," he repeated. He also pointed out that the relevant passage had not been a direct quote -- as if that diminished the article's accuracy.

I was disappointed. The campaign had resorted to the oldest dodge: the candidate was misquoted. But note the careful use of the word "misinterpretation." Clearly, someone at Bush HQ had decided this was the best noun to use. After all, it was less confrontational or incendiary than "damn foolish, idiotic mistake" -- which was actually what the campaign was accusing the reporter of committing. And note who was challenging the account. Bartlett did not note that the Bush press office had contacted Bush and that Bush categorically denied having expressed these pro-choice positions in 1978. Bartlett had used the royal "we." In doing so, he had distanced Bush from this reaction. It was not Bush who was calling the reporter incompetent. Instead, "we" were "considering" the 22-year-old newspaper account a "misinterpretation." Given the quickness of the response, I doubted that the press team had checked with the boss, who was then in Kennebunkport, before crafting this line.

Hmm. So, does this somehow reflect on the "relative righteousness" and "virtue" of Bush's side of the abortion debate? When both sides are using "euphemistic language" to explain their flip-flops, then doesn't Hannity's whole premise come into question?

Hannity insinuates that it's only the "pro-choice" candidates that need to bob and weave if they had changed their view from a "pro-life" stance. He even says on page 184 of "Let Freedom Ring" that: "I'm convinced that somewhere in the recesses of their souls,...pro-abortion leaders know that abortion is morally wrong, which is why they refuse to deal squarely with the issue." But the fact that the Bush camp dances around policy changes, too, just shows that "Political Expediency" is a two-way street. It's not so much that the Gore and Bush campaigns dodged out of a guilty conscience over abortion so much as an effort to disguise moves meant to appeal to their party's base.

*NOTE: I couldn't find an online copy of the Michael Kramer 1988 U.S. News article, so I have linked to an archived Salon.com article that has an extended quote from it.

**For those of you out there thinking that Bush may have had a change of heart on abortion after being born again. Here's another quote from the second David Corn article I quoted from in this section:

Bush could, as Gore eventually did, maintain that he experienced a change of heart. In fact, Bush has claimed he under went a religious awakening in the mid-1980s. So he possessed an easy way out: a new relationship with Jesus, a new position on abortion. Hard to argue wth that. But some die-hard anti-abortion activists have been wary of Bush, because he has refused to commit to appointing anti-abortion judges and to selecting an anti-abortion running mate. (They have a point. If you believe abortion is murder, then you ought to name judges who will curtail such wrongdoing -- and you damn well ought to be certain your number-two is not a supporter of a murderous practice.) Among these hardliners, news that Bush had once been pro-choice might reignite suspicions. And Bush's campaign had derided Gore for pulling a switch. Could Bush now confess to having done the same?

So it seems that Bush is suspected by many on the Christian Right of being a "closet pro-choicer"!

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

2004-06-18T20:03:00.000-07:00

Executive Summary

Book: "Let Freedom Ring"
Chapter: "The Left vs. The CIA"
Section: "The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy"

Accusation 1: Liberals don't like the CIA

Hannity starts off the section with this:

"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)

Reality: There are many instances where the Right has attempted to undermine and discredit the CIA when it suited them. The Team B experiment in the 1970's was one such occasion. More recently, the neocons created the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon in order to bypass the CIA with regard to intel on Iraq.

There are also many instances where liberals have strengthened and expanded our intelligence services. One example is that the CIA was established by a liberal: Harry Truman.

So Hannity opens the section with a tremendous overgeneralization.

Accusation 2: Liberals want to dismantle the CIA just when we need it most.

Reality: Ted Gup, author of a book honoring CIA operatives who had fallen in the line of duty, wrote an article where he expressed his concern that today's CIA may not be up to the job of shaking off its Cold War mentality and might need to be replaced by a new agency in order for the U.S. to effectively fight terrorism.

Hannity distorts the article's meaning and mischaracterizes it as an attack on intelligence (if not the nation as a whole) and a call to dismantle the CIA and apparently replace it with nothing, effectively blinding the U.S. with regard to intel.

Accusation 3: Liberals have a visceral contempt for the CIA.

Reality: Two journalists apparently disagree with each other in magazine articles written seven years apart. The disagreement? Whether human intelligence (spies) or technical intelligence (satellites, phone taps, etc.) is the best way to gather information. This is offered as proof of liberal incoherence.

One article was essentially criticizing an economic espionage program the CIA was running (which turns out to have been opposed by many conservatives, as well). The fact that the author apparently feels that we have too many spies is supposedly evidence of a visceral contempt by liberals against the CIA.

But the worst thing in the section was a pretty obvious act of deception. The very same Ted Gup article that Hannity had just attacked for supposedly calling for the elimination of the CIA, is now being cited as a complaint that we need more spies! Hannity apparently tries to cover his tracks by referring to Gup's article as "an article...in its [Mother Jones'] January/February 2002 issue" instead of "the same article by Ted Gup I just cited in the previous paragraph as an example of a call for getting rid of our most important intelligence organization."

Accusation 4: Liberals mocked a prescient CIA's warnings about catastrophic terrorism (read: 9/11) and anthrax attacks on Washington.

Reality: Actually, the article Hannity cites defines "catastrophic terrorism" as an attack with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons causing mass casualties. An attack of the 9/11 variety, while massive, would fall under the "conventional terrorism" label.

The anthrax issue wasn't even brought up by the CIA, but rather then-Defense Secretary William Cohen. Author Peter Pringle was stating that Cohen exaggerated when describing the potency of weaponized anthrax while testifying before a Senate committee (NOTE: Pringle did NOT say that such an attack couldn't happen).

Probably the greatest irony of this particular section is that most of the politicos criticized in the Pringle article for overstating the threat of catastrophic terrorism were members of the Clinton Administration (including Clinton himself), whom Hannity had accused earlier in his book of turning a "blind eye" to the terror threat. Hannity even starts off his attack on the Pringle article by defending former CIA Director John Deutch while failing to note that he served under Clinton.

Accusation 5: Liberals attacked demands to strengthen intel after 9/11.

Reality: Author David Corn is accused of hostility toward the CIA and failing to see the need for a strong intel community; unmoved even after the murder of thousands on 9/11. Yet, Corn's article is simply cautioning the country to carefully consider the actions we take in response to 9/11 (this was confirmed by Corn via e-mail).

Conclusion

Hannity was setting out to provide examples that illustrate a vast conspiracy against the CIA in this section. I didn't see any evidence to support this. Having different views on how best to gather info (e.g., humint vs. techint) or use the intel community in the War on Terror doesn't make someone an opponent of the CIA or intelligence in general.

"The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy", Part 5 of 6

2004-06-07T18:19:00.000-07:00

The final example Hannity cites in this section of "Let Freedom Ring" is an article written by David Corn shortly after 9/11.

Here's the excerpt:

In an October 1, 2001 essay, David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation and a Fox News contributor, attacked Republicans, conservatives, and "the national security cadre" for raising questions "of how best to bolster the military and intelligence establishment." He criticized former secretary of state James Baker "for blaming the Church Committee, the Senate panel that investigated CIA misdeeds in the 1970's for what happened: 'We went on a real witch hunt with our CIA...the Church Committee. We unilaterally disarmed in terms of intelligence.'" Corn also couldn't resist taking a shot at former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who "assailed rules on intelligence gathering that limit CIA interaction with known terrorists, and he asserted that the intelligence budget (about $30 billion) was 'too small.'"

Is it really all that surprising that a leading leftist like Corn would vilify the CIA and those who have tried to strengthen it? Of course not. Corn has never been a fan of the CIA. In 1994 he wrote a book entitled Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades, which the New York Times described as "a scorchingly critical account" of the career of a major agency figure.

What was surprising and disappointing-to me, at least-was that Corn's ideological disdain for the CIA runs so deep that even the murder of three thousand Americans didn't persuade him of our need for a strong intelligence agency. But frankly I shouldn't be surprised. This is part of the liberals' pattern of hamstringing various reform measures (such as efforts to bolster the CIA or reduce marginal tax rates to stimulate the economy), then blaming the other side for the inevitable consequences (security failures and recession, respectively). ("Let Freedom Ring" page 31-32)

Pretty harsh words. I read Corn's column to see what a "leading leftist" with an "ideological disdain for the CIA" would write in an essay for a "leading left-wing magazine" that's "long been a foe of the CIA" in order to "vilify" the Agency. Being the "leading leftist" of the "leading left-wing magazine" would put David Corn towards the outer reaches of the political spectrum, I would think, so this is probably some pretty hardcore stuff that he wrote. Let's have a look:

1.) Corn is first accused of having "attacked Republicans, conservatives, and 'the national security cadre" for raising questions "of how best to bolster the military and intelligence establishment.'"

Here's the quote in context:

The issue for [the national security hawks] is not what causes such unimaginable actions [as 9/11]. On Day One did you hear anyone--in an attempt to understand, not justify, the horror--ask, Why would someone want to commit this evil act? Or note that in this globalized age, US policy--its actions and inactions overseas (justified or not)--can easily lead to consequences at home? No, the national security cadre, out in force, mainly raised questions of how best to bolster the military and intelligence establishment.

Corn is essentially saying that if we hope to defeat the terrorists, wouldn't it be wise to determine the root causes of the 9/11 attacks?

The oft-quoted general, Sun Tzu, once said:

If you know yourself and know your enemy, you will not fear a 100 battles. If you know yourself, but do not know your enemy, for each battle you win, you'll have a defeat. If you do not know yourself and do not know your enemy, you'll never win a battle.

Simply saying you enemy attacked you because they are "evil" is just that: simple. Attacking blindly or, worse yet, based on false assumptions about the enemy could be inviting disaster.

2.) As far as criticizing Baker and Gingrich, Corn was simply describing their media offensive (Baker blamed intel failures on the Church Committee and Gingrich cited inadequate funding).

He goes on to describe how not everyone in the "national security cadre" was so quick to defend the CIA:

Some hawks and others [criticized] US intelligence for failing to detect the [9/11] plot. [One such hawk was] Kenneth Katzman, a terrorism expert at the Congressional Research Service, [who] said, "How nothing could have been picked up is beyond me--way beyond me. There's a major, major intelligence failure, specially since the [previous] Trade Center bombing produced such an investigation of the networks and so much monitoring."

Corn continues by saying "[n]o doubt, there will be official inquiries [into intelligence failures]. But the knee-jerk goal for most of the inquirers will be additional funds for the intelligence community and the Pentagon. The spies will defend their actions and plead, if only our hands were not tied, if only we had more money." Some will no doubt see that as an attack on the intel hawks and the CIA, but consider this: why is it that when schools are failing, increasing their funding is derided by some as "rewarding failure" and "throwing money at the problem", yet when it comes to intelligence, it is seen as the only rational solution and questioning it is to attack it?

Hannity himself says on page 144 of "Let Freedom Ring" that:

[The] gains in student achievement we'd made in the 1950s and early 1960s...had long since been squandered by an educational bureacracy that no longer placed an emphasis on high standards and world-class achievement....Liberals say we're not spending enough money to solve the problem. But that's simply not true. We've invested hundreds of billions of dollars in "reforming" our public schools over the past two decades, and we're spending more today than at any time in our history....The question isn't whether we're spending enough money. We are. The question is whether we're seeing dramatically improved results as a result of our investment. The painful truth is, we aren't. In fact, the results have been disastrous.

Hannity says repeatedly in Chapter 7, "Setting Parents Free", that he considers children's educations vital to our country's survival (just like intel, I would assume). So questioning the strategy of simply increasing spending on education or intelligence doesn't make you an opponent of either. Just as asking the question, "how did we get to this point?" doesn't make you an apologist.

So when Hannity says, "Is it really all that surprising that a leading leftist like Corn would vilify the CIA and those who have tried to strengthen it? Of course not." It's pretty obvious that he either missed the point or didn't read the article. Corn may simply have a different idea of the best strategy for strengthening our intelligence.

3.) Besides questioning the hawks' strategy, Corn also points out that some of the tactics that they put forward may not be as effective as they might think.

Corn says:

[In additon to calls for more money,] the operating assumptions at work deserve close assessment. Human intelligence [(advocated by John McCain, Orrin Hatch and Bob Graham in Corn's column)] against closed societies and secret outfits has long been a difficult, almost impossible, endeavor. Hurling money at it is likely no solution [my emphasis]. During the Vietnam War, when resources were unlimited, the CIA failed spectacularly at humint, essentially never penetrating the inner sanctums of the enemy. Its record of infiltrating the Soviet government was unimpressive (and the same goes for China, Cuba and other targets). As for lifting existing restrictions [on whom the CIA can recruit as informants], imagine the dilemmas posed if the CIA actually managed to recruit and pay murderous members of terrorist groups. What would the reaction be, if one of the September 11 conspirators turns out to have had a US intelligence connection?

Is this what Hannity means by vilifying the CIA? "Vilify" is defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as "To make vicious and defamatory statements about." If anything, statements by Hannity such as "Corn's ideological disdain for the CIA runs so deep that even the murder of three thousand Americans didn't persuade him of our need for a strong intelligence agency" sound more vilifying than Corn's "the operating assumptions at work deserve close assessment".

Bottom line again, most everyone wants strong intelligence and agree that 9/11 underscored that need. We all have the same goal, just different ideas of how to get there.

4.) Hannity says that "Corn has never been a fan of the CIA. In 1994 he wrote a book entitled Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades, which the New York Times described as 'a scorchingly critical account' of the career of a major agency figure."

In Corn's bio on The Nation's web site, the quote goes:

The Washington Monthly called Blond Ghost "an amazing compendium of CIA fact and lore." The Washington Post noted that this biography "deserves a space on that small shelf of worthwhile books about the agency." The New York Times termed it "a scorchingly critical account of an enigmatic figure who for two decades ran some of the agency's most important, and most controversial, covert operations."

Which "controversial, covert operations" did this "major agency figure" Ted Shackley run? In an article Corn wrote about Shackley for TomPaine.com he said that:

In the 1950s, he served in Berlin, a center for espionage, running agents across the Iron Curtain. Agency efforts at that time were generally abysmal; most agents the CIA sent to spy on East European were captured or turned into double agents. In the early 1960s, he was in charge of the CIA's massive station in Miami, which failed to penetrate Fidel Castro?s government but conducted sabotage operations against Cuba and occasionally supported cockamamie assassination efforts (some using mob connections) against Castro.

Shackley went on to become chief of station in Laos and managed a secret war in which U.S.-encouraged tribal forces fought against the North Vietnamese. The tribes ended up decimated -- in part because Shackley and others pushed them to do what was best for the U.S. military not themselves. Then Shackley was chief of station in Vietnam, where the agency never succeeded in collecting much valuable intelligence on the Viet Cong and where it was involved in the controversial Phoenix program, a supposed intelligence-gathering operation in which U.S.-assisted South Vietnamese units sometimes assassinated rather than apprehended their targets.

After years in the field, Shackley rose through the ranks at headquarters, leading the Western Hemisphere division (and overseeing the CIA's operations in Chile to overthrow Salvador Allende, the democratically-elected president) and then heading the East Asia division, which miscalled the fall of Saigon. In 1976, when George Bush the elder was CIA director, Shackley was named the second in command of the CIA's clandestine service. And he was a contender for higher posts in the CIA -- perhaps the director's chair -- until his hard-to-explain relationship with Edwin Wilson, a CIA-operative-turned-rogue-arms dealer -- who illegally peddled weapons to Libyan dictator Moammar Qadaffi -- hit the headlines.

In the mid-1980s, Shackley played a cameo role in the Iran-contra affair. He engaged in back-channel talks with a disreputable Iranian wheeler-dealer who suggested U.S. hostages held in Iran might be released in return for cash or weapons. Shackley indirectly passed this information to a little-known White House aide named Oliver North.

Who were Corn's sources for this "scorchingly critical account"? According to Publishers Weekly, the book is "[b]ased on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and more than 100 interviews with former CIA officers". It is these same CIA officers that provided Corn with a glimpse into what the Washington Monthly called "an amazing compendium of CIA fact and lore". Back to the TomPaine.com article:

When I was interviewing CIA veterans for my book, I asked them about Shackley's rise and the internal culture of the agency. Several said that what counted was not always results but whether it appeared that an officer was doing all he could. After all, the missions at hand were often nearly impossible. Penetrate the VC? Infiltrate Castro's circle or the Kremlin or the inner sanctum of Beijing? If no one could do that, Shackley could not be held accountable for falling short as well.

Accountability has not been a dominant value within the CIA over the years. That was evident in the case of Aldrich Ames, the CIA mole who left clues right and left that he was working for the Soviets yet escaped detection for years. It is somewhat understandable that members of a covert community tend to be protective of one another. But the absence of strict accountability in this ends-justifies-the-means bureaucracy is cause for concern. Especially now that intelligence agencies -- with their information -- gathering responsibilities -- are the first line of defense against Al Qaeda and Osama wannabes.

When the congressional intelligence committees released their final 9/11 report..., Senator Richard Shelby, the senior Republican on the Senate panel, issued a dissent. It was more critical [my emphasis] than the majority report. He noted, for example, the CIA's "chronic failure, before 9/11, to share with other agencies the names of known Al Qaeda terrorists who it knew to be in the country allowed at least two such terrorists the opportunity to live, move and prepare for the attacks without hindrance.... Sadly, the CIA seems to have concluded that the maintenance of its information monopoly was more important than stopping terrorists."

But Shelby was angrier about the lack of accountability within the intelligence establishment. "It is disappointing to me," he wrote, that the majority report "has not seen fit to identify any of the individuals whose decisions left us so unprepared." He added, "Wise presidents dispose of their faltering generals under fire." Yet Bush has embraced Tenet and the CIA rather than hold anyone responsible for the pre-9/11 intelligence screw-ups -- and the intelligence committees, with the exception of Shelby, have not protested.

With remarks like "the CIA seems to have concluded that the maintenance of its information monopoly was more important than stopping terrorists", Shelby sounds more "scorchingly critical" of the CIA in general than Corn's account of one operative. And Shelby's a Republican. Furthermore, institutional issues like lack of accountability, as well as a resistance to sharing information with other agencies are not the product of underfunding and won't be fixed by a bigger budget.

4.) Corn warned against some people taking advantage of 9/11 to advance SDI:

Do not be surprised if the national security establishment even tries to accelerate its push for Star Wars II before the debris is cleared. The event tragically demonstrated the limits of a national missile defense system. (And consider how much worse the day would have been had the evildoers smuggled a pound of uranium onto any of the hijacked flights.) But the loudest theme in American politics--perhaps the only audible theme--in the time ahead will be the quest for security.

I did a quick search on Google and came up with lots of examples of just such a thing. One such article was by neo-con Kenneth Adelman and dated 10/24/2001. Adelman says that "President Bush, showing real leadership and foresight, preaches how missile defense is essential to winning America’s war against terrorism."

He goes on to say that:

[O]pponents of missile defense have been wrong in one sense, but they have been quite right in another. They were wrong that America's today foes couldn't match the degree of evil of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao Tse-Tung. September 11 showed what evil rogue leaders can do. Nonetheless, these critics were right to point out that our foes can use other terrorist methods - in this case, turning American airliners into guided missiles.

But next time it could be actual missiles falling on American or European cities. Imagine how much easier it would be for America's attackers to buy a long-range missile or two from North Korea or Iraq, arm it with nuclear or chemical weapons fire it at America`s still defenseless shores.

Why make it easy for America's enemies? Why not shield America and its allies from one of the easiest means of inflicting the greatest horror?

Is this really the best way "to bolster the military and intelligence establishment" to fight terrorism?

5.) Corn's last point was that since our leaders were urging us to show our resolve after 9/11 by continuing with our lives as normal (which he called a "nostrum"), then likewise, they need to try and go on governing without allowing 9/11 to affect debates on the issues of the day.

Unfortunately, that's not the way it works. Though we try to go back to normal, acts of extremism aren't easily put aside and "extremism begets extremism."

* * *
I recently sent an e-mail to David Corn and asked him to read today's excerpt from "Let Freedom Ring" and get his opinion. Here's the complete text of his response:

Mitch Krannert: I [read your article] and didn't see it as an attack on the CIA or intelligence at all. Rather, I saw it as a call for the country to carefully consider its response to 9/11 and not simply accept the assertions of the intel hawks.

David Corn: I think you have it right. I'd be happy if anyone who read that portion of Sean's book would read the original piece. To any sentient person, it would be obvious that I was not attacking the need for strong and effective intelligence. I was merely noting that the simplistic nostrums of the hawks deserved examination and scrutiny.."

* * *
That was the last of this section's examples of supposed liberal hostility towards the CIA. Next time, we'll wrap it up for this section with some conclusions.

Later,

Mitch

"The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy", Part 4 of 6

2004-06-03T17:55:00.000-07:00

So far, "The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy" section of "Let Freedom Ring" has yet to prove anything other than it was poorly researched. Nevertheless, let's push ahead and take a look at the next accusation: that liberals mocked "the CIA's prescient concerns about terrorism".

Hannity says:

The Nation, another leading left-wing magazine, has also long been a foe of the CIA. But a 1998 feature story really takes the cake. Writing just three years before September 11, author Peter Pringle mocked former CIA director John Deutch and his colleagues for warning that "an act of catastrophic terrorism" could "have the effect of Pearl Harbor" and "divide America into a 'before and after.'"

The Nation article conceded that terrorism's toll in the 1990's was rising. "In 1983, 271 Americans were killed by terrorist attacks, most of them in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon. Then came bombs at the World Trade Center in 1993 (six dead, 1,000 injured), the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995 (168 dead, 500 injured) and the Khobar Towers Air Force housing complex in Saudi Arabia in 1996 (nineteen dead, 500 injured)." But then Pringle sniped, "In the rush to play a new war game there is always a tendency to hype the threat," specifically ridiculing the potential threat of an anthrax attack in Washington. It also quoted a professor who argued that "despite the lurid rhetoric, a massive terrorist attack with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons is hardly inevitable. It is not even likely. ... Terrorists wish to convince us that they are capable of striking from anywhere at any time, but there is really no chaos. In fact, terrorism involves predictable behavior, and the vast majority of terrorist organizations can be identified well in advance."

The article concluded by criticizing Republicans for adding $9 billion to the military budget, "including several additional millions for antiterrorism projects" and suggested the GOP might try to politicize the issue in the future.

Then came September 11 and subsequent anthrax attacks. Did The Nation's staff possess the intellectual integrity to admit or reassess its monumentally flawed judgement? Did it refrain from mocking further the CIA's prescient concerns about terrorism? Did it come to value a strong, vibrant, aggressive CIA to make sure such attacks could never happen again? Hardly. ("Let Freedom Ring" pages 30 - 31)

Since this excerpt comes from a chapter titled "The Left vs. The CIA" and it contains quotes like

"The Nation...magazine...has long been a foe of the CIA...[b]ut a 1998 feature story really takes the cake"

and

"[after] September 11 and subsequent anthrax attacks[, d]id [The Nation] refrain from mocking further the CIA's prescient concerns about terrorism?"

I guess it would be safe to assume that the article Hannity is quoting from is about the CIA. And was the Pringle article about the CIA? No.

Let's get to parsing:

1.) Hannity says that "The Nation...magazine...has...long been a foe of the CIA" without offering any proof, so I guess we'll just take that on faith. And if we accept that The Nation has been hostile for a long time, saying that the Pringle article "really takes the cake" makes me think that this is going to be some pretty powerful stuff. But consider Hannity's opening remark:

Writing just three years before September 11, author Peter Pringle mocked former CIA director John Deutch and his colleagues for warning that "an act of catastrophic terrorism" could "have the effect of Pearl Harbor" and "divide America into a 'before and after.'"

Now, when you first read this passage, what do you think it means? Sounds like Pringle is ripping the CIA, or at least its director, for warning way ahead of time against a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11. You might think that Hannity called him a "former CIA director" because he's no longer there, not because he made the remarks after he left. Furthermore, if the reader is assuming John Deutch made these comments while still at the CIA, and Hannity says the remarks came from "John Deutch and his colleagues", it's probably not too much of a stretch to say that some readers might assume "his colleagues" were other sitting intelligence officials. Not an unreasonable assumption since Webster's Dictionary defines a "colleague" as "A partner or associate in some civil or ecclesiastical office or employment. It is never used of partners in trade or manufactures." If true, these actions would no doubt indicate a certain hostility towards the CIA, wouldn't they?

Actually, the comments that Pringle is quoting are from an article Deutch wrote for Foreign Affairs magazine after he left office (George Tenet was CIA Director when both Deutch's and Pringle's articles were written in 1998). The article, entitled "Catastrophic Terrorism" was written together with "Ashton Carter, an ex-Pentagon assistant secretary; and Philip Zelikow, a former member of the National Security Council", whom Pringle refers to as its "distinguished authors". True, one could make the argument that these were Deutch's "former colleagues" if the definition is stretched to include the entire administration and they all served at the same time, or "colleagues" since they are all three now professors, though at different colleges, but Hannity was pretty vague.

So vague, in fact, that more than one interpretation of that first accusation can be plausibly defended. Maybe he honestly expected the reader to understand that Pringle was quoting an article written by a former CIA director and other former Administration officials. One part that's especially susceptible to misinterpretation, though, is the mention of "catastrophic terrorism" because Hannity doesn't define the term. Sure, we may think we know what it means. After all, 9/11 seemed pretty catastrophic to all who witnessed it. But for the sake of Pringle's and Deutch's articles, "[c]onventional terrorist weapons are truck bombs filled with fertilizer explosive... [and] catastrophic terrorist weapons [my emphasis] are nuclear, chemical and especially [my emphasis] biological." Which sounds more like 9/11? Catastrophic terrorism is concerned with the use of WMD's by terrorists. Didn't Hannity read the article? Do I always end up asking this question?

2.) I read Pringle's article. While he obviously felt that Deutch had indulged in bit of hyperbole, Pringle didn't seem to doubt that catastrophic terrorism would "have the effect of Pearl Harbor". In fact, he even says that "no one denies the threat of catastrophic terrorism." What Pringle took issue with was the fact that "the pace at which it has taken center stage as the prime threat to US security is almost as unnerving as the threat itself." It wasn't the impact that such an attack would have that Pringle questioned, it was a matter of how imminent such WMD threats really were and how it was leading to calls for the creation of new bureaucracies (something Pringle called "Manhattan Project syndrome"). Focussing much of his attention in the article on biological weapons, Pringle seems to feel that many in the defense industry (whom he called "New Threat merchants") were simply hyping the threat in order to drum up business for themselves at the federal trough.

Pringle says that according to "the government auditor, ...it's hard to keep track of where all the money is going, let alone whether it is being spent wisely."

3.) As far as mocking Deutch: while Pringle does point out Deutch's vested interests in putting the terror threat in the spotlight and calls him "the quintessential academic/consultant to the Pentagon and the defense industry",
his article for The Nation also says that "[t]he thrust of [Deutch's article] is a grand reorganization of the Pentagon, CIA and FBI bureaucracies to eliminate the perennial agency overlaps and gaps between 'foreign' and 'domestic' terrorism" and that "a new, multi-agency National Intelligence Center, as proposed by Deutch et al. in Foreign Affairs, might not only be a good idea but a necessity".

And in a piece for Slate, Pringle says almost the exact same thing:

Adequate intelligence is one need. And we do know the CIA screwed up over Aum Shinrikyo [(who perpetrated a nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subway)]. In hearings before Congress in 1995, the CIA admitted it had somehow missed the activities of the Aum, even though the event had been reported in the Japanese and European press and even in the U.S.-owned International Herald Tribune. This suggests that a new intelligence center for terrorism, as proposed by former CIA director John Deutch et al. in their Foreign Affairs article on "Catastrophic Terrorism," is not only a good idea but a necessity.

Pringle goes on in his article for The Nation to single out Deutch's article for praise:

In the article on catastrophic terrorism, Deutch et al. mention the proposal of Harvard professor Meselson and his law professor colleague, Philip Heymann, for an international c onvention making it a crime for individuals to engage in the production of biological or chemical weapons. The existing chemical and biological conventions apply only to states. The idea is to deter national leaders, such as Saddam Hussein, and groups such as Aum Shinrikyo, from seeking to develop chemical or biological weapons, and to discourage corporations from assisting them because the scientist or the CEO could be arrested. If such a treaty had existed and been supported by the United States in the eighties when Iraq was using poison gas and developing biological weapons, the suppliers and advisers on whom Saddam depended could have been brought to trial.

4.) Hannity begins the next paragraph by saying that "The Nation article conceded that terrorism's toll in the 1990's was on the rise" and then followed it with a quote from Pringle about the casualties from various attacks. But if you read Pringle's article, you'll see that he starts that paragraph off by saying "in most recent years since 1980 the number of Americans killed by terrorism has been fewer than ten, but the toll can suddenly jump." The list of casualties from terrorist attacks was not indicating a rise in "terrorism's toll" but rather spikes in casualties.

5.) As far as "specifically ridiculing the potential threat of an anthrax attack in Washington", here's the quote from Pringle's article:

In the rush to play a new war game there is always a tendency to hype the threat. Last November Defense Secretary William Cohen appeared on TV holding a bag of sugar claiming the equivalent amount of anthrax spores would be enough to kill half the population of Washington, DC, an illustration that would only be valid if the dispersal were perfect and the wind were always blowing in the right dire ction. Republican Senator Fred Thompson, chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, asked meekly of the terrorist threat, "Is it being overblown?" (The pun was apparently unintended.)

First, this has nothing to do with the CIA, it was the Secretary of Defense making the argument. Second, how is pointing out an exaggeration "ridiculing the potential threat"? Exaggerations don't help inform the public, they merely serve to alarm it. Enough such false alarms and the public becomes desensitized to a legitimate threat.

6.) The professor that Pringle quoted was Ehud Sprinzak of Jerusalem's Hebrew University and he's talking about the threat of terrorists using WMD's, as evidenced by Hannity quoting him as saying that "despite the lurid rhetoric, a massive terrorist attack with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons is hardly inevitable. It is not even likely."

To quote NPR: "Altogether, the anthrax attacks killed five people and made 17 others ill, according to the Centers for Disease Control."

Obviously, the anthrax attacks aren't something to be taken lightly and were a tragedy for those affected. But they hardly constituted a massive attack. That's not to say it can't happen, just that Hannity's assertion that The Nation should apologize is unfounded.

7.) Pringle did point out at the end of his article that the Republicans added $9 billion to the military budget, but what he was criticizing was the tactics they used to accomplish it: "by emphasizing unpreparedness", playing on the public's fears. What Hannity also forgets to mention, is that the bulk of Pringle's criticism in the article is for the Media and the Clinton Administration whom he sees as guilty of spreading alarm and throwing money around.

He takes issue with Richard Preston of The New Yorker magazine and Diane Sawyer of ABC for promoting the claims of Kanatjan Alibekov, who had worked in the Soviet bio-weapons program. Alibekov, who changed his name to Ken Alibek when he moved to the U.S. (Pringle used the word "defected" even though it happened in 1992 after the Soviet collapse), asserted that the Soviets had developed a vast array of bio-weapons and "had built huge plants for the production of biological weapons....
Alibek claims that the Russians had actually used these [huge] facilities to produce tons of deadly anthrax, some of which had been genetically engineered so that available vaccines were useless, and some of which may have been put into the warheads of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Alibek also asserted that the Russians had experimented with deadly cocktails of smallpox spiked with the Ebola virus, which causes internal hemorrhaging, and with Venezuelan equine encephalitis, a brain virus."

Pringle points out that there were many experts who took issue with Alibek but weren't really heard.

Dr. Peter Jahrling, the chief scientist at the US Army medical research Institute of Infectious Diseases...[and] one of Alibek's original debriefers[, ]told The New Yorker, "His [Alibek's] talk about chimeras [mixtures] of Ebola is sheer fantasy, in my opinion." Preston also consulted Joshua Lederberg, the Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist and a member of a working group at the National Academy of Sciences who advises the government on biological weapons and the potential for terrorism. Lederberg told Preston, "It's not even clear to me that adding Ebola genes to smallpox would make it more deadly." Putting these comments higher up in the article would have been more responsible journalism, clearly, but it would also have spoiled the story.

I already mentioned Clinton's Secretary of Defense, William Cohen. Bill Clinton himself, whom Hannity accused of turning a blind eye to terrorism in Chapter 1 of "Let Freedom Ring", is also criticized by Pringle:

One of the true believers in the need for elaborate defenses against germ weapons is none other than President Clinton [my emphasis]. He became a convert, and started pushing for stockpiles of vaccines, after reading--among all the intelligence reports on terrorism and the Iraq crisis--a novel titled The Cobra Event [by the same Richard Preston who wrote the New Yorker article on Alibek], about a fictitious germ attack on Manhattan using a mixture of smallpox and cold viruses. Chemical and biological warfare is great fiction material, of course, but are we in danger of being unable to separate fact from fiction?

8.) Where's the CIA in all this? For what's supposed to be an attack on the CIA, Pringle only mentions the agency by name 3 times; and they are hardly attacks. Here's one: "The thrust of [Deutch's article] "Catastrophic Terrorism" is a grand reorganization of the Pentagon, CIA and FBI bureaucracies to eliminate the perennial agency overlaps and gaps between 'foreign' and 'domestic' terrorism." And two: "[A]s a defector who has apparently outlived his usefulness to the CIA's covert intelligence world, [was Ken Alibek] trying to make a buck in civvy street by exaggerating the importance of his information?"

Probably the toughest remark I read about the CIA was number three, which was describing the dash to the federal trough for anti-terror dollars:

The FBI wants to send more agents into embassies abroad and is demanding its own planes to shuttle investigative teams around the world. Local and state governments used to dealing with flu epidemics are preparing for the nightmare gas or microbe attack. And one can only imagine what antiterrorist projects the CIA has been dreaming up with its "black" budget of covert ops.

U.S. and Western intelligence in general, are mentioned several times, and it comes in statements like "building a production line for...[biological] weapons and keeping it in reserve...[is something] the Soviets did--something US intelligence had known about for some time." That is not an attack.

* * *

So here we have an article that is criticizing Washington's rush to embrace a new threat in order to justify spending billions of dollars. I don't see where it mocked "the CIA's prescient concerns about terrorism" or, for that matter, where the CIA's "prescient concerns about terrorism" even appeared in the article.

NOTE: I used the URL "http://www.bridgeoflove.com...bioterrorism.html" to look up Pringle's article because the copy in The Nation's archive doesn't seem to show up. The Nation URL is listed as "http://www.thenation.com/issue/981109/1109PRIN.HTM".

"The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy", Part 3 of 6

2004-06-03T12:13:00.000-07:00

So far, nothing Hannity has said in this section has held up to scrutiny. Not his overgeneralizing about liberals being the enemies of the CIA, not his claim that conservatives have been its steadfast ally "for decades", and definitely not his accusation that Ted Gup's article in Mother Jones was calling for the CIA's abolition.

His second example must be more convincing, though, since he claims that it exposes a "visceral...contempt [that is held by liberals] for the CIA".

Hannity continues on with his attack in this section by saying:

"Mother Jones [magazine] also condemned the CIA for having too few spies-or was that too many spies? 'Human intelligence-the network of spies on the ground-was allowed to degrade steadily," an article argued in its January/February 2002 issue. "To the fore came satellite imagery and National Security Agency's capacity to intercept communications. High-tech spying had proved effective against foreign states during the Cold War. Against terrorism, its value was dubious at best.'

"But in a previous issue of Mother Jones, in January/February 1995, writer Robert Dreyfuss seemed to be saying that conservatives were unwise in wanting to build up the CIA's human intelligence capabilities.

"'Though the CIA is being downsized and there are calls to abolish it, there are also calls from CIA insiders, some congressional Republicans, and a few outside conservatives to expand the CIA's use of spies-known in the trade as human intelligence (humint)-at the expense of techint, or intelligence gathered by satellites, listening devices and other technical means,' wrote Dreyfuss. 'Robert Steele, a former CIA officer who has put forward a number of otherwise thoughtful ideas about reforming the CIA, recently called for a doubling of the agency's clandestine espionage and for placing all of the new spies under "nonofficial cover."' Dreyfuss went on to point out that Congress may have been more receptive to expanding the CIA given a greater number of Republicans and the commitment of soon to be House Speaker Newt Gingrich to the idea.

"So which is it? Are there too few Mike Spanns or too many? Are we conservatives off base for wanting to make the CIA too big or too small? Or is that really the point? Rather, isn't this just the Left demonstrating its visceral (and incoherent) contempt for the CIA-and ultimately seeking to diminish its effectiveness and public support?" ("Let Freedom Ring", pages 29-30)

Well, what about it? Was this apparent disagreement over CIA staffing levels a case of the Left demonstrating a "visceral ... and incoherent ... contempt for the CIA"? Let's start digging and find out.

1.) Hannity claims that Mother Jones magazine has "condemned" (a pretty strong word) the CIA for having too few spies and then later accusing it of not having enough.

First off, this whole episode wasn't a case of the Mother Jones editorial staff speaking to an issue in the name of the magazine. Rather, it was two different writers, expressing their own viewpoints, seven years apart, in two unrelated articles (in fact the disagreement, if there was one, seems to be more about "humint vs. techint" than "too many spies vs. too few spies"). Secondly, since when is it an indictment of a magazine when it allows journalists writing for it to reach different conclusions? It's as if he's criticizing Mother Jones for not having an agenda, or perhaps he's so convinced that they do have one he thinks he's exposed a hole in it. Lastly, how in the world does a perceived inconsistency in one magazine over the span of nearly a decade prove "incoherence" on the part of the entire liberal community? That's pretty weak.

So weak in fact that, if anything, Hannity is hurting his own case. Wasn't he supposed to be illustrating the existence of a vast left-wing conspiracy against the CIA in this section of the book? How does showing disagreement among liberals help make the case that they are conspiring? Don't conspirators usually share a common set of beliefs?

2.) Another criticism of this excerpt's first paragraph is when Hannity says that the pro-humint quote comes from "an article ... [in Mother Jones'] January/February 2002 issue." The title of this article? "Clueless in Langley" by Ted Gup. You might remember Ted Gup from Part 2 of this critique on "The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy". He's the guy that Hannity railed against for writing an article calling for the overhaul or replacement of the CIA (Hannity mischaracterized it as a call to simply get rid of the CIA and, presumably, replace it with nothing and leave us blind).

Now Hannity's quoting from the very same article he just claimed was a call to abolish the CIA, quoting it in the very next paragraph of his book and, incredibly, framing it as a call to increase the number of spies! The way the excerpt reads, saying that it's quoting from "an article ... [in Mother Jones'] January/February 2002 issue" instead of saying "the same article by Ted Gup I just quoted at length in the previous paragraph" leaves me with the impression that he's trying to mislead the reader into thinking that he's quoting from a different article. Misleading the reader to think that you're quoting from more sources than you actually are? Using the same article to prove an opposite point? That would be intellectually dishonest. Maybe it was just an error in editing.

3.) Hannity quotes Robert Dreyfuss as saying that "Robert Steele, a former CIA officer who has put forward a number of otherwise thoughtful ideas about reforming the CIA, recently called for a doubling of the agency's clandestine espionage and for placing all of the new spies under 'nonofficial cover'."

The second part of the quote, which mentions "nonofficial cover", isn't really explained, seemingly left in as an afterthought. But what does "nonoffical cover" mean? To find out, I read the Robert Dreyfuss article that Hannity quoted from.

"The CIA Crosses Over" is an article that chronicles "a [CIA] program revived by the late director in the 1980s, [William Casey, that] marries the spy agency to corporate America in order to gather intelligence on economics, trade, and technology. ... [At the time the article was written, 1995,] dozens of U.S. corporations--from Fortune 500 companies to small, high-tech firms--[were] secretly assisting the CIA, allowing the agency to place full-time officers from its operations divisions into corporate offices abroad."

Dreyfuss goes on to describe the program in greater depth, defining the term "nonofficial cover":

Serving under what is referred to as "nonofficial cover" (NOC), CIA officers pose as American businessmen in friendly countries [my emphasis], from Asia to Central America to Western Europe. There, they recruit agents from the ranks of foreign officials and business leaders, pilfer secrets, and even conduct special operations and paramilitary activities.

The story of the CIA's NOC (pronounced "knock") program, ... raises serious questions about the CIA at a time [(1995)] when the agency is already beset by scandal [(such as the Aldrich Ames case)]. Yet the NOC program has grown to its present bloated size without any public scrutiny--and with no open discussion within the companies whose interests could be harmed by a spy scandal.

From there the article tells the NOC program's story through the eyes of former members, pointing out some of its many problems:

Interviews with former CIA officers who have served overseas and with midlevel and senior retired CIA officials reveal that the NOC program is beset with bungling, corruption, and poor tradecraft. The program is so badly run that NOCs are resigning from the CIA in droves, many after serious mistakes by the CIA that could have resulted in their exposure, arrest, or worse.

Tom Darcy is a former CIA officer who served for five years as a NOC in Western Europe. Asked whether the CIA's clumsy management has caused any NOC to land in a prison overseas, Darcy says, "Yes. More than once. Or die."

While the article concentrates on economic espionage and tends to be very critical of the NOC program, Dreyfuss does say that the "CIA's operations within terrorist (my emphasis), drug trafficking, and arms dealer networks often involve NOCs, who can move more easily in such circles without raising suspicion." So there may be cases where having agents risk operating under nonofficial cover is preferable; at least in concept. Dreyfuss' main thrust is that the actual program is being run incompetently and doesn't seem to really get the results the CIA had hoped for.

Even with the criticism of Robert Steele's idea that we need more spies, the article is mostly calling attention to a program that (a) is a symptom of an ossified Cold War bureaucracy trying to justify continuing to exist at its present size and (b) needs to go away.

NOTE: I wrote to Robert Dreyfuss and, to make sure I had the right take on his article, asked him to describe the basic points he was trying to make in "The CIA Crosses Over" This is the full text of his response:

My Mother Jones piece, "The CIA Crosses Over," did criticize what amounted then to a failed program. On the other hand, I think I tried to make clear that it is a program that ought to have failed. I'm troubled by the idea of U.S. corporations and other private groups giving covert support to a CIA presence overseas. Not only does it put all U.S. businessmen, journalists and others under suspicion of working for the CIA, but it is improper on its face. My broader criticism was that after the Cold War, we could have vastly reduced the size of the U.S. intelligence community, and we did not. It seems incomprehensible that we'd need to maintain the CIA at its Cold War strength in the 1990s--and the threat of terrorism doesn’t change my mind. You're right that Hannity takes cheap shots whereever he can take them, and I don't respect him enough to care what he says about my work. Believe it or not, I've never once watched the guy. I don't plan to.

This leaves me with the impression that he's not so much for reducing humint at the expense of techint or vice versa, rather he would like to see both reduced.

4.) As far as accusations by Hannity of the Left's "contempt" for the CIA: it may not be visceral, but the Dreyfuss article's contemptuous quotes like "glorious ineptitude" and "horribly mismanaged" came from the CIA officers themselves.

One quote decries the CIA's favoring "inside officers" and using NOC's as whipping boys:

A CIA officer says, "Just like the way the Catholic Church protects priests accused of sexual abuse or wrongdoing, headquarters will always cover up for the division chief, the chief of station, or the deputy chief of station--and they will discipline the NOC."

Imagine Hannity's reaction to that quote if it hadn't been said by a CIA officer! Then again, it's really a pretty juicy comment to pass up on. Maybe the fact that he didn't pounce on it just shows that he didn't read the entire article. Who can say?

5.) Now on to the people mentioned: Robert Dreyfuss and Robert Steele. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, Dreyfuss worked for Ralph Nader's Public Citizen organization before becoming a freelance journalist. Currently, "he's on the mastheads of Mother Jones, The Nation, and American Prospect, and a regular contributor to half-a-dozen magazines". It's pretty safe to assume he's not going to be asked to write a piece for The National Review or American Spectator, so you would think he would be a good candidate for demonstrating the visceral contempt Hannity talks about. If you look at his "The CIA Crosses Over" article, though, you'll see that the last section is titled "Let's get smart about intelligence" and not "Let's get rid of intelligence".

And it's also worth noting that Dreyfuss does say in the quote that Steele "has put forward a number of otherwise thoughtful ideas about reforming the CIA". Not abolishing the CIA, mind you, reforming it. And these ideas for reform were generally thoughtful ones, in Dreyfuss' opinion. Do words like these indicate a visceral contempt for the CIA?

6.) Another point of interest is that in a different article he wrote on economic espionage (Mother Jones May/June 1994), Dreyfuss says that:

Hidebound--one wants to say "rock-ribbed Republican"--conservatives, who worship the free enterprise system, oppose any government interference in the marketplace. While endorsing CIA efforts to prevent economic espionage by other governments, notably Japan and France, the right vigorously opposes the CIA getting into any economic spying of its own.

Sounds like conservatives were against the NOC program's primary mission. If conservatives don't like the NOC program and want it cancelled; then, using Hannity's logic, doesn't a desire to eliminate the NOC positions mean they think there are too many spies and are calling for a cut? Couldn't they be accused weakening our intelligence community by opposing one of its programs?

7.) Hannity never explains who Robert Steele is, so to be thorough, I will.

Steele has been known for some time as a proponent of CIA reform. In a 2002 piece written by John Perry Barlow for Forbes, Steele gets mentioned:

After a decade of both fighting with and consulting to the intelligence community, I've concluded that the American intelligence system is broken beyond repair, self-protective beyond reform, and permanently fixated on a world that no longer exists.

I was introduced to this world by a former spy named Robert Steele, who called me in the fall of 1992 and asked me to speak at a Washington conference that would be "attended primarily by intelligence professionals." Steele seemed interesting, if unsettling. A former Marine intelligence officer, Steele moved to the CIA and served three overseas tours in clandestine intelligence, at least one of them "in a combat environment" in Central America.

After nearly two decades of service in the shadows, Steele emerged with a lust for light and a belief in what he calls, in characteristic spook-speak, OSINT, or open source intelligence. Open source intelligence is assembled from what is publicly available, in media, public documents, the Net, wherever. It's a given that such materials--and the technological tools for analyzing them--are growing exponentially these days. But while OSINT may be a timely notion, it's not popular in a culture where the phrase "information is power" means something brutally concrete and where sources are "owned."

Steele has also written books on CIA reform: "On Intelligence" and "The New Craft of Intelligence".

His opinions might surprise you, too. Here's some quotes from a departmentofintelligence.com interview Steele gave, titled "Robert Steele answers our questions about US Intelligence 2 years after September 11th" (In fairness, Steele made these comments after "Let Freedom Ring" went into print.):

- "Unfortunately, 9-11 did not change U.S. intelligence in any significant manner."

- "Sadly, America must see another 5,000 body-bags, and elect a new President, before we might possibly come to our senses."

- "There is no Global War on Terrorism. That is propaganda."

- "The US is losing the war on terrorism."

- "[T]he White House is 'out of control' and severely undermining global stability and legitimacy."

- "The neo-conservatives and their corporate paymasters remind me of Hitler and Goering. Everything they are doing is built on a platform of lies and the abuse of executive power. They have carried the big-hearted but very naive American people into a situation where American unilateralism is literally destroying the world. We have become, in a word, immoral as a Nation."

- "America is a great Nation and can survive massive incompetence and malfeasance within the White House, but I worry that in this delicate time, we cannot survive another four years of George Bush and his 'stupid white men.' We need Europe as a partner of the people, as a partner for truth, as a partner in stabilizing the world and achieving legitimate governance everywhere. France saved us once from the British, now we need France's help in saving us from ourselves."

Robert Steele sounds a lot harsher with regard to U.S. intelligence and foreign policy than the authors Hannity has criticized.

* * *

I think it's pretty obvious at this point that the idea of today's excerpt somehow demonstrating either a "visceral (and incoherent) contempt for the CIA" or a desire "to attack and undermine America's intelligence community" by liberals is pretty laughable. Criticizing the CIA when criticism is justified (such as the case of the NOC program) is not an attempt to undermine our country's intelligence; allowing a failed program to continue is. The fact that some of the roughest remarks in the articles Hannity cited came from CIA operatives indicates questionable research methods, since it undermines his accusation of ideological motives by the authors. But not citing Ted Gup as the author of the first article seems suspiciously deliberate (since it helps conceal a contradiction) and adds to the sense that poor research may not be the only issue here. In any event, the point about Mother Jones being conflicted over CIA staffing levels is erroneous and irrelevant.

Next time, yet another example of the "Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy". And this next one, in Hannity's words, "really takes the cake."

Later,

Mitch

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

2004-05-22T13:04:00.000-07:00

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

2004-05-20T21:19:00.000-07:00

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