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How a former CIA officer’s efforts to get Congress to investigate the rendition and torture of a CIA captive failed!
CIA
operative Sabrina De Sousa, who has been convicted in absentia in Italy
of the kidnapping of Egyptian cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known
as Abu Omar, in Milan in 2003. De Sousa says she did not know about the
incident, and even if she did, she says she should be given immunity
because she was a diplomat.Barbara L. Salisbury / MCT / Landov
WASHINGTON, D.C. — As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama made many promises. One notable pledge was
that, as president, he would strengthen whistleblower-protection laws
to make it easier for federal employees to report waste, fraud and abuse
in government.
“Often the best source of information … is an existing government
employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out,” Obama
said, in a campaign fact sheet entitled “The Change We Need in
Washington.” “We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of
wrongdoing and partners in performance.”
Since then, Obama has signed an executive order and a bill strengthening
the rights of whistleblowers. But the new law does not provide the same
protections to government employees who work in the intelligence
community and want to report wrongdoing. Former undercover CIA officer
Sabrina De Sousa found that out the hard way.
In 2005, De Sousa, who was officially listed as a State Department
diplomat assigned to the U.S. Consulate in Milan, was implicated in the rendition of
a radical Egyptian cleric in Italy named Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr,
better known as Abu Omar. Italy had granted him political asylum in 2001
after the Egyptian government alleged that he was part of a terrorist
group. While in Italy, Abu Omar spoke out publicly and vehemently
against U.S. military action in Iraq prior to the March 2003 invasion.
Italy responded by placing him under surveillance.
Abu Omar at an Amnesty
International press conference in 2007. He was kidnapped in Milan in
February 2003 and taken to a high-security prison outside Cairo, where,
he says, he was subjected to torture.
Khaled Desouki / AFP / Getty Images
On Feb. 17, 2003, while walking to his local
mosque, Abu Omar was approached by an Italian police officer and
longtime CIA informant named Luciano Ludwig Pironi, who asked to see his
passport. Moments later, a white van pulled up and Abu Omar was shoved
inside. He was then flown to Egypt, where, he said, he was subjected to
brutal torture techniques, such as electric shocks, for four years. When
Italian authorities tried to locate Abu Omar, U.S. officials told them
he had disappeared into the Balkans.
Italy launched an investigation into Abu Omar’s abduction in 2005,
and in 2007 more than two dozen Americans suspected of being involved in
the rendition, including De Sousa, who Italian law enforcement
officials alleged was one of the masterminds of the operation, were
indicted. Nineteen of the Americans whom Italy indicted and convicted,
De Sousa says, were not working under their true identities. This meant
she was one of the few “real” operatives accountable for the rendition.
But De Sousa insists she never played an active role in the execution
of the rendition. She says she worked as a translator between the CIA
rendition team and the Italian military-intelligence-and-security
service, which was involved in the early stages of planning the
rendition. In November 2009, she was sentenced in absentia to a
five-year prison term in Italy.
Abu Omar was released from detention in Egypt in 2007 and remains
there with his family. He has filed a civil claim against De Sousa. Last
year, Italy convicted him in absentia on terrorism charges in what
appears to be an attempt to cover up the Italian government’s own role
in his rendition.
Last year, for the first time, De Sousa revealed that
she was a CIA operative working for the National Clandestine Service
(NCS). For nearly a decade, she had been working behind-the-scenes
firing off letters to members of Congress and executive branch
officials, informing them that the U.S. violated international laws when
the CIA decided to kidnap Abu Omar.
De Sousa has never publicly discussed all the efforts she undertook
to alert government officials and lawmakers that the Abu Omar’s
kidnapping was a “colossal mistake” and convince them to investigate her
claims of wrongdoing, which implicate top CIA officials. She told Al
Jazeera that she first contacted top Bush administration officials, but
received no response. In 2009, hoping the response would be different
under Obama, she disclosed to then-CIA Director Leon Panetta and
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton what she says are troubling details
about her treatment by the U.S. government in the aftermath of her
whistleblowing. But, like the Bush administration officials before them,
they also ignored her pleas, De Sousa says, and the CIA turned her into
a “scapegoat” while the executive branch looked away.
Blowing the whistle -
Though she was aware of the plans to capture Abu Omar, De Sousa says,
she was eventually “cut out” because she did not get along with the CIA
station chief in Milan, Robert Lady, and that on the day of the
operation she was skiing with her family.
There was nothing definitive in the classified cables, De Sousa says,
about the threat the CIA said Abu Omar posed to national security as
the rendition operation was being planned. “The cable was full of
‘suspected of,’ ‘alleged to.’ Nothing that said ‘he was responsible
for.’ Nothing definitive,” De Sousa says.
De Sousa describes her CIA colleagues in Rome and Cairo as acting
like keystone cops in the aftermath of Abu Omar’s rendition, trying to
figure out who had the evidence against him to present to Egypt so he
could be prosecuted.
“The CIA station chief in Cairo said to Jeffrey Castelli [CIA station
chief in Rome] ‘Where’s the evidence?’ Castelli said, ‘I thought you
had the information.’ And Cairo said, ‘We don’t have it. We thought you
had it.’ Castelli says, ‘We don’t have it.’ Then Cairo says, “We issued
this arrest warrant on your behalf. So where is the evidence?" The
blunder ultimately forced Egypt to set Abu Omar free.
“This is exactly when the whole cover-up started,” she says. “It
turns out there was a big miscommunication between Cairo Station and
Rome Station. There wasn’t any prosecutable evidence against Abu Omar.
It’s why he was never picked up by the Italians. But Castelli decided he
wanted a rendition and he got one.”
De Sousa alleges that Castelli was gunning for a promotion to a
coveted CIA position in New York City and to land it someone had to be
subjected to extraordinary rendition. “Who could he pick out from this
target list of 10 people he had. Abu Omar because it was the easiest.
Why was it the easiest? Because he was already under surveillance by the
Italians and they were sharing information [with the CIA],” De Sousa
says.
Castelli, who now works at a private security firm in Arlington,
Virginia, called Endgame, did not respond to requests for comment.
“Abu Omar was a nobody,” De Sousa says. “The renditions are meant for
imminent, very dangerous threats and [are meant to be used in]countries
that are incapable of laws that would allow them to pick up people who
pose threats to national security. They’re not meant for a country like
Italy already following the guy around.”
De Sousa says that, based on her reading of classified CIA cables,
there were “four people responsible for this thing”: Castelli; a shadowy
figure identified as “Agent X,” whom De Sousa would not discuss further
and who told Lady to make sure the Abu Omar rendition was executed;
Tyler Drumheller, former chief of CIA covert operations in Europe; and
Pironi, the CIA informant and Italian police officer.
But De Sousa says Italy demanded that people be held accountable for
the embarrassing mistake and the CIA chose her and several of her
colleagues. “Despite the circumstantial charges against me, the CIA
scapegoated me to deflect attention from those who authorized the
rendition and also prevent further investigations into the operation,”
De Sousa says. “Also, I believe I was left out of the initial immunity
deal [Italy agreed to for other, more senior officers] in retaliation
for my interaction with Congress.”
The first trial over the
secret U.S. "extraordinary rendition" program, in Milan in 2007, with
25 CIA agents among the defendants charged with the kidnapping of Abu
Omar.
Giuseppe Cacace / AFP / Getty Images
In 2005, after the investigation in Italy
began, the CIA instituted a travel ban for the officers connected to the
rendition because arrest warrants had been issued for them in Europe.
De Sousa, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born and raised in India
and whose family still lives there, was concerned she would not be able
to see her elderly parents. She was able to make one trip back home in
September 2005 (the CIA approved it as long as she could avoid traveling
through Europe) to see her father, who was hospitalized and later
passed away. The following year, she asked the agency if it would pay
for her mother to the U.S. for Christmas. But CIA officials balked. (De
Sousa’s family was unaware of her employment with the CIA).
“They said, ‘You don’t qualify for the funds.’ They told my attorney
they didn’t want to set a precedent,” she recalls. “We’re talking about
$8,000. They were spending millions on this cover-up.” De Sousa says she
saw the writing on the wall. “They wanted me out,” she says. “They knew
what my limit was. They knew that the minute they tried to force me to
sign memos saying I wouldn’t travel overseas they knew I would resign.”
But it didn’t happen as quickly as the agency would have liked. De
Sousa spent three years trying to work through internal channels to
bring a resolution to her case, at first raising questions about why the
agency had not invoked diplomatic immunity for her and then calling
attention to the rendition and alleged torture of Abu Omar by the
Egyptians.
“I went through the whole thing internally,” De Sousa says. “I
started off by approaching my supervisor, and then I went to the
ombudsman at CIA. He was a great guy. He tried to go to bat for me and
he was told to lay off. He said, ‘I can’t communicate with you anymore
due to a seventh-floor edict [at the agency’s Langley headquarters where
the director and other top officials work].’ I then went to the
inspector general. The IG said, ‘It’s not part of our charter or mission
to deal with this.”
Yet after she approached the watchdog’s office, the inspector general
at the time, John Helgerson, said he wanted to launch an investigation
into the rendition, De Sousa says, an assertion confirmed in a 2008
report published byThe New York Times.
But the head of the NCS, Jose Rodriguez, who would later come under
federal investigation for his role in ordering the destruction of nearly
100 interrogation videotapes of two high-value detainees held at
black-site CIA prisons, said no. NCS would conduct its own review,
Rodriguez said. In other words, the division of the CIA that De Sousa
says screwed up would investigate itself.
Then-CIA Director Michael Hayden also convened an
accountability-review board to look into the rendition. De Sousa asked
to see the results but was told she was not authorized because she
wasn’t involved in the rendition, despite the fact that she had been
indicted and convicted for it.
“So I went to Congress informally,” De Sousa says. “I went to Linda
Cohen, the liaison with CIA [for the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence]. I said, ‘Linda, did you see this review-board report?’
She said, ‘Oh, they’re smart. They sent this to committee. They put a
such a high classification on it none of the staffers could see it.’”
Cohen did not respond to requests for comment.
De Sousa wrote to Rodriguez and Hayden. But they did not respond to
her inquiries either. “So then I started sending letters to Congress,”
she says. De Sousa sent letters to members of Congress who sat on the
House and Senate intelligence committees, including Sens. Jay
Rockefeller and Kit Bond and Reps. Pete Hoekstra, Silvestre Reyes and
Jan Schakowsky. But she says Rockefeller, Bond, Hoekstra and Reyes did
not respond and Schakowsky, whose staff she met with, did not help her.
In February 2009, De Sousa resigned from the CIA, forfeiting her
retirement. “I get up every morning and say, ‘Why?’ In 16 years I never
saw anything like this,” she says. “I didn’t sign up for this. If they
told me when I signed up ‘By the way, just to let you know, it’s
possible if something happens we’re going to disavow and you may not see
your family again,’ I would have said, ‘I’m not doing this.’”
She continued firing off letters. On May 18, 2009, she wrote to
former Secretary of State Colin Powell. “For three years, I tried every
option for resolution available to me, both with my employer and in
letters to the heads of several Departments and Agencies, as well as
Congress and the Senate in both administrations without success,” she
wrote.
Powell was Secretary of State when the Abu Omar rendition took place.
He responded a couple of weeks later. “Thank you for your letter. I
regret the situation you are in, but since the matter is in litigation, I
am unable to be of any help,” Powell wrote. “Further, I have no
knowledge about any of these matters that would give me a basis to
comment or intercede.”
De Sousa says Powell’s State Department would have had to have
authorized Abu Omar’s rendition, because Italy is a NATO member and the
rendition took place on Italian soil.
In 2009, De Sousa sued the State Department for failing to invoke
diplomatic immunity, which she argued she was entitled to as a State
Department diplomat. The U.S. government retorted during a federal court
hearing that it was not responsible for the actions of a foreign court.
A federal district-court judge dismissed De Sousa’s case but the judge
described her treatment by government officials in the Obama
administration as “appalling.”
A year after she wrote to Powell, however, De Sousa secured two
important meetings: one with Schakowsky’s staff and another with Sen.
Dianne Feinstein’s staff.
The intelligence committees -
Schakowsky is a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence (HPSCI). She had initially expressed interest in attending
the meeting, but never showed up, De Sousa says. Prior to the meeting,
Adam Lurie, the staff director and counsel for HPSCI’s subcommittee on
oversight and investigations, asked De Sousa’s attorney, Mark Zaid, if
she would be invoking the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act. Zaid replied that she wouldn’t.
When De Sousa met with Schakowsky’s staffers, she says, they did not
believe her claims. “They asked how did I know [about the mistakes the
CIA made in rendering Abu Omar]? I said I read the cables,” De Sousa
recalls. She says Schakowsky’s office never followed up. Lee Whack, a
spokesman for Schakowsky, told Al Jazeera, “We are unable to comment on
this issue. The congresswoman takes very seriously the privacy of anyone
who brings issues to the committee. That said, we cannot discuss
classified work conducted by the committee.”
De Sousa also met with Feinstein’s staff. The powerful chairwoman of
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), has publicly
proclaimed her support for whistleblowers and urged
intelligence-community employees to air their grievances with select
members of Congress. De Sousa enlisted the human rights organization
Human Rights First to help set up the meeting. The organization sent a
letter to David Grannis, the staff director for SSCI.
De Sousa communicated via email with Grannis in August 2010 after he
expressed interest in hearing what she could disclose about Abu Omar’s
rendition. Grannis told her the best way for her to share the
information with him “is either by hard-copy delivery” or “via secure
fax.” De Sousa prepared a memo and hand delivered it to the SSCI’s
security director, Jim Wolfe. She never heard from Grannis or anyone
else on the intelligence committee again, she says.
An SSCI staffer, however, denies that the panel did not investigate
De Sousa’s claims. The staffer says De Sousa met with “SSCI staff
multiple times on subjects that I cannot confirm openly but that she was
raising at the time as concerns with CIA actions.”
“Committee staff followed up with CIA independently to seek CIA’s
views and explanations,” the staffer says. “Any contention that the SSCI
did nothing is simply factually untrue.” De Sousa says she was never
informed about any inquiries the committee made about her with the CIA.
At the time De Sousa disclosed details about the Abu Omar rendition
to Grannis, the SSCI was one year into a review of the CIA’s rendition,
detention and interrogation program. The committee prepared a voluminous
report on the program, the executive summary of which is currently
undergoing a declassification review, and concluded that the
approximately two dozen “war on terror” suspects were illegally rendered
and secretly held by the CIA.
For years, De Sousa believed Abu Omar’s case would be included in the
committee’s report. “It has to be,” she says. “It’s such a bungled case
and it also involves torture by proxy governments [Egypt].” But the
SSCI staffer told Al Jazeera in an email that the “executive summary and
findings and conclusions of the committee’s report,” that is the
portions due to be declassified, “do not reference Abu Omar.”
“There are passing references to him elsewhere in the report, but I
wouldn’t want you to have the impression that the report focuses on him
or alleged CIA actions involving him to any significant degree,” the
aide said.
The CIA would not comment on the allegations De Sousa leveled against
the agency or respond to questions about the Abu Omar rendition.
False promises -
Recently, Feinstein said that former National Security Agency (NSA)
contractor Edward Snowden could have and should have come to her with
evidence of the agency’s mass surveillance of Americans instead of
handing over a trove of highly classified documents to journalists.
De Sousa believes Feinstein would have ignored Snowden, just as her
staff did, according to De Sousa, when she came to them with evidence of
alleged wrongdoing by the CIA in the Abu Omar case.
And former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently told NPR’s
Terry Gross that Snowden could have “expressed his concerns” in other
ways, such as “reaching out to some of the senators” about the legality
of NSA spy programs.
But when De Sousa’s attorney, Mark Zaid, wrote to Clinton at the
State Department to raise concerns about her treatment and Abu Omar’s
rendition and torture he never received a reply.
Earlier this month, the Senate passed an intelligence-spending bill
that included new whistleblower protections for intelligence personnel
that are supposed to codify Obama’s 2012 policy directive that
strengthened whistleblower laws for federal workers. But the bill comes
too late for De Sousa. She is now using the Freedom of Information Act
in an effort to clear her name. She says she will aggressively try to
pry loose government documents to reveal internal discussions about the
Abu Omar rendition, whose case is pending before the European Court of
Human Rights. In the meantime, there is still an international arrest
warrant out for her. That makes traveling to visit her mother and
siblings difficult.
CIA operative Sabrina De Sousa, photographed in her home in Washington, D.C., in July 2013.
Barbara L. Salisbury / MCT / Landov
She hasn’t given up on trying to hold
government officials and her former colleagues accountable. “Castelli’s
chain of command who approved the rendition — James Pavitt [former CIA
deputy director of operations], Stephen Kappes, [a close confidante of
Feinstein who was the agency’s deputy director], Tenet, Drumheller,
Rodriguez and Rizzo [former CIA general counsel]. Here are the guys I
wish to hold accountable,” she says. “Hayden, Rice, Feinstein and
Schakowsky also have to be held accountable for the subsequent cover-up
and refusal to investigate an issue that is a violation of international
law and torture.”
Zaid says that during one of the oversight committee meetings he
attended with De Sousa to discuss the Abu Omar case, she had told
congressional staffers that she had been unable to secure a job because
of the conviction. “One of the staffers actually told her to go back to
India and get a job there,” Zaid says. “Can you believe that?”
Despite the agreement between Ukraine and Russia, Russian secret services have long lead subversive and intelligence
activities on the territory of Ukraine. This statement was made by to
the Channel 5 by the acting Deputy Head of Presidential Administration
of Ukraine Andriy Senchenko.
“When we talk about Russian presence… We have 25 employees of Russian Central Intelligence in our custody
alone. Moreover, there are people there who lived in Ukraine under false
identities for 2 to 3 years, and against the agreement between Ukraine
and Russian Federation, were conducting subversive and intelligence
activities on the Ukrainian territory,” he said, responding to Russian
State Duma MP Ilya Ponomarev that was present in the studio, who alone
voted against the secession of Crimea and Sevastopol by Russia.
Senchenko believes that the main task
of the Russian agents embedded in Ukraine and their local wards was to
disrupt the presidential elections and undermine the Ukrainian state.
“For Putin, the number one task is to
disrupt the stabilization process in Ukraine, to disrupt presidential
elections, it is obvious… and the only tool for achieving this are those
separatists who disrupt peace in Donbas first of all and in our country
in whole; they are instrumental for the destabilization of the
political situation in the country for a long time ahead,” he explained. Responding to criticism against the
Ukrainian government, he stated: “We were criticized for the sluggish
start of the anti-terrorist operation. But the beginning of this
operation was tied to disentangling the protests in the region. And we
managed to do this almost across the entire Donbas, in order to protect
the innocent people who came to protest against living in poverty, total
corruption, against injustice… We managed to pull them away from the
protests, we, as the authorities, have reached out to these people,
telling them that we are their partners in building a new Ukraine,” said
Senchenko.
“Who is left there today? Those who
came there for money of the ‘Family’ [Yanukovych's clan], for the money
of those who want to maintain total control over the Donbas region, over
its resources, who are trying to grip tightly the right to exploit
Donbas’s 10 million residents. And we will speak with them in another
tone,” he added.
“And even then – we will try to
dissuade those who are not tainted by crime, and don’t have blood on
their hands… We say: “Leave, we are ready to grant amnesty to you,” said
the acting deputy head of the Presidential Administration.
Source: ukrinform.ua. Translated by Crimea_SOS, edited by Alya Shandra
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Iraqi Turkmen pose with
their weapons as they ready to fight against militants led by the
jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) on June 21, 2014,
in the Iraqi village of Basheer, south of Kirkuk
The black-clad fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,
sweeping a collapsing army and terrified Iraqis before them as they advance toward Baghdad,
reflect back to us the ghoulish face of American empire. They are the
specters of the hundreds of thousands of people we murdered in our
deluded quest to remake the Middle East. They are ghosts from the
innumerable roadsides and villages where U.S. soldiers and Marines,
jolted by explosions of improvised explosive devices, responded with
indiscriminate fire. They are the risen remains of the dismembered
Iraqis left behind by blasts of Hellfire and cruise missiles, howitzers,
grenade launchers and drone strikes. They are the avengers of the
gruesome torture and the sexual debasement that often came with being
detained by American troops. They are the final answer to the collective
humiliation of an occupied country, the logical outcome of Shock and
Awe, the Frankenstein monster stitched together from the body parts we
left scattered on the ground. They are what we get for the $4 trillion
we wasted on the Iraq War.
The language of violence engenders
violence. The language of hate engenders hate. “I and the public know
what all schoolchildren learn,” W.H. Auden wrote. “Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.” It is as old as the Bible.
There
is no fight left in us. The war is over. We destroyed Iraq as a unified
country. It will never be put back together. We are reduced—in what
must be an act of divine justice decreed by the gods, whom we have
discovered to our dismay are Islamic—to pleading with Iran for military
assistance to shield the corrupt and despised U.S. protectorate led by
Nouri al-Maliki. We are not, as we thought when we entered Iraq, the
omnipotent superpower able in a swift and brutal stroke to bend a people
to our will. We are something else. Fools and murderers. Blinded by
hubris. Faded relics of the Cold War. And now, in the final act of the
play, we are crawling away. Our empire is dying.
We should have
heeded, while we had a chance, the wails of mothers and fathers. We
should have listened to the cries of the wounded. We should have wept
over the bodies of Iraqi children lined up in neat rows in the morgues.
We should have honored grief so we could honor life. But the dance of
death is intoxicating. Once it begins you whirl in an ecstatic frenzy.
Death’s embrace, which feels at first like sexual lust, tightens and
tightens until you suffocate. Now the music has stopped. All we have
left are loss and pain.
And where are the voices of sanity? Why
are the cheerleaders of slaughter, who have been wrong about Iraq since
before the invasion, still urging us toward ruin? Why are those who
destabilized Iraq and the region in the worst strategic blunder in
American history still given a hearing? Why do we listen to simpletons
and morons?
They bang their fists. They yell. They throw tantrums.
They demand that the world conform to their childish vision. It is as
if they have learned nothing from the 11 years of useless slaughter. As
if they can dominate that which they never had the power to dominate.
I sat in a restaurant Thursday in Boston’s Kenmore Square with military historian Andrew Bacevich.
You won’t hear his voice much on the airwaves. He is an apostate. He
speaks of the world as it is, not the self-delusional world our empire
builders expect it to be. He knows war with a painful intimacy, not only
as a Vietnam combat veteran and a retired Army colonel but also as the
father of a U.S. Army officer killed in a 2007 suicide bombing in Iraq.
“In
the 1990s there was a considerable effort made in the military, but
also in the larger community of national security experts scratching
their heads and [asking] what are the implications of all this
technology,” he said. “They conceived of something called the Revolution
in Military Affairs—RMA. If you believed in the Revolution of Military
Affairs you knew that nothing could stop the United States military when
it engaged in a conflict. Victory was, for all practical purposes, a
certainty. People like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, and I expect
Dick Cheney also, bought this hook, line and sinker. You put yourself in
their shoes in the wake of 9/11. An attack comes out of Afghanistan, a
country frankly nobody cares about, and you conceive of this grand
strategy of trying to transform the Islamic world. Where are we going to
start? We are going to start by attacking a country [Iraq]—we had it
under surveillance and sanctions for the past decade—where there is a
bona fide bad guy to make a moral case and where we are confident we can
make short work of this adversary, a further demonstration that the
American military cannot be stopped. They utterly and totally
miscalculated. Iraq is falling apart. And many of these people, either
in government or outside of government, who were proponents of the war
are now advocating for a resumption of the American war. Not one of them
is willing to acknowledge the extent of that military miscalculation.
Once you acknowledge it, then the whole project of militarizing U.S.
policy towards the Greater Middle East collapses.”
Bacevich blames
the concentration of power into the hands of the executive branch for
the debacle. He said that since the Kennedy administration “the incoming
president and his team, it does not matter which party, see the
permanent government as a problem. If we [the new officials] are going
to get done what we want to get done we have to find ways to marginalize
the permanent government. This has led to the centralization of
authority in the White House and means decisions are made by a very
small number of people. The consultation becomes increasingly informal,
to the point it is not even documented.”
“I do not think we even
know when the decision to go to war with Iraq was actually made,”
Bacevich said. “There is no documented meeting where [President George
W.] Bush sat down with how many people—six, 10, 25—and said, ‘Let’s
vote.’ The decision kind of emerged and therefore was implemented. Why
would you operate that way? You would operate that way if you viewed the
Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the CIA and the State Department as, in a
sense, the enemy.”
“The invasion of Iraq was intended to be a
catalyst,” he said. “It was supposed to be the catalyst that would
enable us ... to change the region. It turned out to be the catalyst
that resulted in destabilization. The big question of the moment is not
what can we do or is there anything we can do to salvage Iraq. The
question is to what degree have our actions resulted in this larger
regional mayhem. And to the extent they have, isn’t it time to rethink
fundamentally our expectations of what American power, and particularly
American military power, can achieve?”
“We need to take a
radically different course,” Bacevich said. “There is an analogy to be
made with Great Britain in the wake of World War I. It was in World War I
that Britain and France collaborated to dismantle the Ottoman Empire to
create the new Middle East. While on the one hand there was an
awareness that Britain was in decline, at the level where policy was
made there was not a willingness to consider the implications of that
fact. It took World War II to drive it home—that the [British] empire
was doomed. I think that is where we are.”
Out of this decline,
Bacevich said, is emerging a multipolar order. The United States will no
longer be able to operate as an unchallenged superpower. But, he said,
similar to the condition that existed as the British Empire took its
last gasps, “there is very little willingness in Washington or in policy
circles to take on board the implications multipolarity would call for
in terms of adjusting our policy.”
The inability to adjust to our
declining power means that the United States will continue to squander
its resources, its money and its military.
“By squandering power
we forfeit our influence because we look stupid and we bankrupt
ourselves,” Bacevich said. “We will spend $4 trillion, not dollars spent
in the moment but dollars we will have spent the last time the last
Afghanistan veteran gets his last VA check. That money is gone forever.
It is concealed because in the Bush administration’s confidence that
victory would be easily won the government did not bother to mobilize
the country or increase our taxes. We weaken ourselves economically.
People complain about our crappy infrastructure. Give me $4 trillion and
I probably could have fixed a couple of bridges. And we must never
forget the human cost. Lives lost, lives damaged. And in these two wars
[Afghanistan and Iraq] there does seem to be this increase in PTSD that
we don’t know what to do about. It is a squandering of human capital.”
Bacevich
said the “military mind-set” has so infected the discourse of the power
elite that when there is a foreign policy problem the usual response is
to discuss “three different courses of military action. ... Should it
be airstrikes with drones? Should it be airstrikes with manned aircraft?
Special operations forces? Or some combination of all three? And that’s
what you get.” The press, he said, is an “echo chamber and reinforces
the notion that those are the [only] options.”
The disintegration
of Iraq is irreversible. At best, the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunnis
will carve out antagonistic enclaves. At worst, there will be a
protracted civil war. This is what we have bequeathed to Iraq. The
spread of our military through the region has inflamed jihadists across
the Arab world. The resulting conflicts will continue until we end our
occupation of the Middle East. The callous slaughter we deliver is no
different from the callous slaughter we receive. Our jihadists—George W.
Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle,
Thomas Friedman and Tommy Franks—who assured us that swift and
overwhelming force in Iraq would transform the Middle East into an
American outpost of progress, are no less demented than the jihadists
approaching Baghdad. These two groups of killers mirror each other. This
is what we have spawned. And this is what we deserve.
A report suggests that many of the SSA’s critical functions could soon be outsourced to private-sector partners and contractors.
June 24, 2014 |
For months there have been rumors that the Social Security
Administration has a “secret plan” to close all of its field offices. Is
it true? A little-known report commissioned by the SSA the request of
Congress seems to hold the answer. The summary document outlining the
plan, which is labeled “for internal use only,” is unavailable from the
SSA but can be found here.
Does
the document, entitled “Long Term Strategic Vision and Vision
Elements,” really propose shuttering all field offices? The answer,
buried beneath a barrage of obfuscatory consultantese, clearly seems to
be “yes.” Worse, the report also suggests that many of the SSA’s
critical functions could soon be outsourced to private-sector partners
and contractors.
Here are five insights from this austerity-minded outline.
1. This is death by jargon.
The
Social Security Administration has contracted with an entity called The
National Academy of Public Administration, or NAPA, to “conduct a study
and submit a high-level plan proposing a long-range strategic vision.”
The seven-member panel conducting
the study includes current and former employees of government
contractors IBM, Cisco, and Grant Thornton, as well as career
bureaucrats and the editor of Government Executive magazine.
The
panel’s four-page overview lays down a nearly impenetrable barrage of
consultant-speak. This is a language in which “smaller workforce” means
“layoffs” and “reduced physical infrastructure” is a euphemism for
“closing field offices.” It is a language in which goals, objectives,
strategies and tactics are reduced to a pulpy mash of undifferentiated
“vision elements.” The language is rich in booster-ish phrases like this
one: “Stress program integrity in everything we do.” (As opposed to,
you know, not doing that.)
For most of its four pages the
document’s runic language artfully dodges the question at hand,
preferring instead to inform the public of such need-to-know information
as the fact that “we embrace change and reward managed risk.” It is not
until the final page that the bomb is dropped, surrounded by a cloud of
verbal decoys. The key phrase: “Our communication and business
practices enable a dispersed workforce that is no longer working in
centralized, traditional offices.”
“Centralized, traditional offices.” Or, as the rest of the world calls them, “offices.”
The
document suggests that Social Security’s administrative functions will
be transferred online, allowing for human contact only “in very limited
circumstances.” Even in those cases it appears that the default options
will be telephone calls and online chats, together with rare meetings
with personnel who may be housed in the offices of other agencies – or,
conceivably, private corporations.
2. The SSA isn’t resisting congress’ brutal cuts.
Despite
the fact that a Democratic president is running the executive branch,
the Social Security Administration appears to be accepting the harsh
budget cuts imposed upon it by Congress with an air of surprising
passivity. This is puzzling. Social Security is an enormously successful
and popular program. Historically only conservative Republicans have
urged cuts to its administrative budget. Those cuts are already
frustrating the public and undermining public confidence in the program.
(For more on this topic see the Special Senate Subcommittee on Aging, href=”http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/20/us-column-miller-social-security-idUSBREA2J1OV20140320″>Mark Miller of Reuters, Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times, Hiltzik again, and ourselves.)
And
yet, these needless and harmful cuts are being accepted as a fait
accompli by both the NAPA panel and the Social Security Administration
itself. The SSA’s “Agency Strategic Plan for 2014-2018,”
which is published where the “strategic vision” document might
logically be found, glosses over current and impending staffing
reductions with language like this: “In the coming years, as we prepare
for more employee retirements and continued budget constraints, we will
develop and implement a strong succession plan to prepare for the new
skills, competencies and work styles of a leaner, modern Federal
workforce.”
English translation: We are downsizing for budget reasons but would rather not say too much about it.
Then
there’s this: “The size of our workforce has declined by about 11,000
employees since the beginning of FY 2011 and we expect this trend to
continue … we estimate that more than 21,000 of our employees will
retire by FY 2022. A shrinking workforce affects our ability to meet the
needs and expectations of our customers and stakeholders.”
English translation: Our staffing budget keeps getting slashed and our service will continue to decline accordingly.
The
fact that neither the SSA, the administration, nor the president
himself are publicly fighting these brutal cuts is a betrayal of Social
Security’s promise. That betrayal is made even more acute by the fact
that cuts to Social Security’s administrative budgets do not help the
deficit in any way, since the SSA is fully funded from Social Security’s
revenues.
3. They intend to do more outsourcing, too.
One
of the bitter ironies of the bipartisan austerity craze has been the
fact that, while there has been an assault on government jobs, there has
been an equal or greater push to transfer government revenues to the
private sector using lucrative, cost-inflating “privatization”
contracts.
That seems to be what somebody has in mind for Social
Security’s future, too. One of the 29 “vision elements” in the Vision
2025 document states that service delivery should be “integrated across
SSA programs and with external partners …” It goes on to state that all
support functions for SSA should be “provided through a shared services
model (e.g., within SSA, across government, and by contract).” (Emphases
ours.)
No descriptions are offered for those “external partners”
or the recipients of those “shared services” contracts, but the message
seems clear: they’re closing the field offices, laying off employees,
and shifting the work to other agencies as well as profit-driven (and
therefore ultimately costlier) private enterprises.
The choice of
private partners thus far isn’t encouraging. The user portal informs
people signing up for online access that they may be subject to an
eligibility verification by Experian. That’s the credit-rating firm that
is currently the subject of a multistate investigation, as well a a
lawsuit on behalf of the people of Mississippi. The complaint,
which is unrelated to Social Security, alleges that Experian knowingly
made “sweeping errors” on consumers’ credit records and repeatedly
violated consumer protection laws.
4. They expect people to do everything on the Internet – and their website is terrible.
The
“vision” document states it plainly: “We … use online, self-service
delivery as our primary service channel.” They also expect to “automate
processes to maximize operational efficiency.” “Direct service options
(e.g. in person, phone, online chat, video conference)” will only be
available “in very limited circumstances.”
That’s a bad idea.
Seniors use the Internet far less than other people. Only 57 percent of
people over 65 are online, as opposed to a nationwide average of 87
percent, according to a recent Pew study.
Disabled people, Social Security’s other major user group, can also
experience difficulties accessing the Internet. Minorities and
low-income people, many of whom depend on the SSA’s assistance, are also
less likely to be web-connected.
This idea gets even worse when
one attempts to use the SSA’s website, as we did recently. We will
document that tragicomic misadventure in greater detail shortly, but the
short version is this: although I have led very large-scale information
technology projects, it took me several days to successfully enroll in
the SSA website. The delays were caused by a combination of downtime and
poor web design.
The website is confusing, even for tech-savvy
and (relatively) youthful users. Imagine how daunting it must be those
who aren’t comfortable with computers, those whose cognitive skills may
be in decline, and those who have lost the full use of one or more
senses. To make matters worse, the SSA site explicitly forbids would-be
users from allowing others to navigate the process on their behalf.
On
the other hand, converting more of Social Security’s functions to
website technology could be result in a very lucrative payday for
government contractors like… well, like IBM and Cisco.
5. They’re downsizing just as demand grows.
The
“Vision 2025” agenda has a number of other problems. For example, it
calls for ending the practice of retaining employees with specialized
knowledge of specific programs. They are to be replaced with
“generalists,” even though applicants and beneficiaries are more likely
to obtain useful information from employees with more specific
knowledge. And yet, the “vision” calls for “empowering” employees even
as it proposes to deprive them of the specialized knowledge they need to
use that power wisely.
But the most important takeaway is this:
They’re closing field offices, downsizing their workforce, and trying to
force everyone through an inadequate Internet portal. That’s all in an
effort to reduce Social Security services at a time when the need is
about to grow dramatically.
The scare rhetoric about the cost of
baby boomers’ benefits is just that: scare rhetoric. Any long-term
imbalances are easily rectified through one or two simple and equitable
adjustments (like lifting the payroll tax cap). But there is no question
that the number of Social Security applicants and recipients is going
to increase dramatically, and with them will come a greater
administrative workload. The SSA’s own website lays out the numbers: “By
2033, the number of older Americans will increase from 46.6 million
today to over 77 million.”
The SSA is perfectly willing to cite that figure as part of an overly fearmongering set of statistics meant
to raise false alarms about solvency. But when it comes time to craft
an appropriate plan for the program’s administrative future, statistics
like that are nowhere to be found. Instead, the SSA continues to close
offices and plans even more dramatic cuts to its workforce.
It has
become increasingly clear that plans are underway at the SSA to impose
more needless cuts on SSA’s budgets and render the program’s benefits
increasingly inaccessible to Americans who have earned them. The
American Federation of Government Employees iscurrently on a campaign that encourages people to register their objections to this troubling plan.
Richard (RJ) Eskow is a blogger and writer, a former Wall Street executive, a consultant, and a former musician.
CHEYENNE
- More than 8 million Americans have enrolled in health-care insurance
since the Affordable Care Act went into effect late last year, and
another 3 million low-income
Americans were able to get on Medicaid thanks to state expansions.
But
here in Wyoming, one of 23 states that has thus far declined to expand
the state's Medicaid eligibility, those low-income adults looking to buy
their own insurance are facing an uphill battle steeper than anywhere
else in the nation.
A new report published Wednesday by
health insurance analysis company HealthPocket found that low-income
Wyomingites pay the highest premiums in the country when purchasing
plans through the ACA insurance marketplace. The report specifically
looks at those adults who fall into the "Medicaid gap" - people who make
less than 100 percent of the poverty level, and are thus ineligible for
tax credits to help them buy insurance.
Such subsidies are given
to those earning between 100 and 400 percent of the federal poverty
level, which is defined as $11,490 a year for an individual. For those
earning less than that, Medicaid was supposed to cover the gap, but a
Supreme Court ruling made the expansion of Medicaid optional for states.
In
its report, HealthPocket looked at the cheapest available catastrophic,
bronze and silver health insurance plans in each of the 23 states that
have chosen not to expand Medicaid. It then determined that if someone
were making just under 100 percent of the poverty level, what proportion
of their income would go solely to the cost of that coverage.
"The
Affordable Care Act defined affordable coverage for an employee in
employer-provided coverage to have premium costs at most 9.5 percent of
the employee's household income," the report read.
"By this
definition of affordability, the only affordable exchange plan for any
enrollees with incomes below 100 percent FPL that were ineligible for
Medicaid was the cheapest catastrophic health plan in Kansas."
In
other words, of the 69 "tiers" of plans being offered among the 23
non-Medicaid expansion states, only one was deemed affordable for
low-income earners. Specifically, the cheapest catastrophic insurance
plan being offered by Kansas would cost a 30-year-old enrollee $87.71 a
month, or about 9 percent of the total earnings for someone making just under the poverty level.
Every
other plan in the non-Medicaid expansion states exceeded that
percentage, but nowhere were they higher than in Wyoming. That same type
of catastrophic coverage plan in Wyoming runs $265.34 a month for a
30-year-old nonsmoker, totaling 28 percent of a poverty-level income.
And
it just gets worse for more inclusive plans and for older people. A
50-year old looking to purchase a silver plan on Wyoming's insurance
exchange can expect to pay at least $523.61 a month, or more than half a
poverty-level income. Dan Neal, the director of the Casper-based
Equality State Policy Center, said such rates make it virtually
impossible for Wyoming's poorest to afford health insurance.
"Frankly,
if you're below 100 percent of poverty level, you probably couldn't
afford the 9 percent you see in Kansas," Neal said. "How can anybody
with that little money pay that much of their income on health insurance
and still expect to feed themselves, keep a roof over their heads and
then pay for transportation to go to work? It's just impossible." The
obvious solution, to Neal at least, is for Wyoming to expand Medicaid to
the 17,000 uninsured currently living below the poverty level.
But while the state Legislature in March empowered Gov. Matt Mead to negotiate such a plan
with
the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, it doesn't
appear that much has come of those negotiations. "We've heard that they
are talking, but that's all we've heard," Neal said. "It'd be great to
find out what they've discussed and what they're proposing."
Gov.
Mead's office declined to comment on the progress of Medicaid
negotiations, deferring instead to Wyoming Department of Health Deputy
Director Lee Clabots, who indicated that little has been discussed so
far. "There has been some preliminary touching base with the regional
(Medicaid) office here, but beyond that, nothing has really happened,"
Clabots said. "I don't think we'd expect something more until early fall
sometime."
Neal said he's concerned that any Medicaid
expansion the governor proposes could come with a work requirement,
which is a non-starter with many expansion activists. "There are certain
things in these discussions we think are complete deal-breakers, and
one of them is a work requirement," Neal said. "Many (uninsured
Wyomingites) are already working, and others are at home taking care of a
spouse or other family member, and some are simply sick and can't
work."
Those concerns are shared by Jan Cartwright, the
executive director of the Wyoming Primary Care Association, which
provides technical assistance and training to the community health
centers across the state that provide care to the uninsured. "A single
person at 100 percent of poverty makes less than $1,000 a month, and in
many cases, they're already working, so it's sort of a moot point,"
Cartwright said. "There's a real unfairness in this where people who
could be eligible for Medicaid have to buy insurance outright, yet
people at 200 percent of poverty level get subsidies. I just don't see
the fairness in that."
Cartwright said she's hopeful
that, as implementation of the ACA continues, more insurers will express
interest in joining Wyoming's insurance exchange. If that were to
happen, she said, the increased competition could drive down overall
rates, making it easier for lower-income residents to afford coverage.
But Tom Hirsig, the state's insurance commissioner, said Wyoming
provides some unique challenges to health insurance companies that has
so far dissuaded all but two from joining the state's exchange. The key
problems, he said, are the state's low population and the lack of any
real major population centers.
"When you look at prices
of insurance, you can't compare Wyoming to metropolitan areas with
millions of people," Hirsig said. "We don't have lots of doctors, and
we're so spread out that preventative care is sometimes not accessible
to people in Wyoming. Every state except Wyoming has a population
center."
He added that the idea that insurance
companies are taking advantage of the relative lack of competition in
order to "gouge" customers is misguided, given that the ACA mandates how
much profit insurers can make off of exchange enrollees. Specifically,
insurers can only use 20 percent of subscriber premiums to cover
administrative costs and investor profits. The rest must be spent on
medical care and related quality improvement activities. "If they don't
meet that, they have to refund premiums to their customers," Hirsig
said. "So insurance companies aren't the ones getting rich. If insurance
companies were getting rich, we'd have lots of insurance companies
here."
Hirsig has been encouraging insurance companies
to take part in Wyoming's exchange, but most, he said, have their sights
on larger markets, and it's unclear whether any will opt to join
Wyoming's exchange in the coming year.
"It's probably not going to change anytime soon," he said.
Published on: Sunday, Jun 22, 2014 - 10:51:47 pm MDT
Subject: [New post] Heroic Ukrainian female officer taken hostage by the terrorists "blew up" social media.
TheBadFoodie posted: "Social media users are calling to rescue Ukrainian officer Nadiya Savchenko, who has been taken hostage by Donbas terrorists. For this all those impartial are being asked to post the photograph of the aviator, who has already been dubbed "G.I. Jane," o"
Social media users are calling to rescue Ukrainian officer Nadiya Savchenko, who has been taken hostage by Donbas terrorists.
For this all those impartial are being asked to post the photograph of the aviator, who has already been dubbed "G.I. Jane," or publicly demonstrate support. "All you have to do is post her photo with the hashtag #SaveOurGirl on social networks or publicly show your support," Twitter users write.
Earlier, a video has been shared on the web in which the hostage is being questioned by terrorists. Despite the accusatory tone of the questions and her essential helplessness, the pilot is holding up with dignity.
Nadiya survived Iraq and is a merited professional in the Ukrainian army with over 10 years' experience. During the questioning it was discovered that the woman had been captured during an attempt to rescue wounded Ukrainian soldiers: "I was going after our wounded. Two of our armoured carriers were shot in the village of Metalist and I came for the wounded."
Nadiya Savchenko has no illusions as to the intentions of the criminals. When a bandit (as is concluded from the context – of Russian nationality) asked her the question: "If you are freed, will you return here with weapons?", she answered: "I will not be freed, I will be killed. You Russian government will kill me on accusations that they ascribe."
We remind you that Putin's propaganda, in its usual manner, called Nadiya – senior lieutenant, navigator-operator of a Ukrainian Armed Forces helicopter, "a sniper involved in the murder of Russian journalists."
The group "InfoResist" shared a video report of Military TV of Ukraine about the hero dated back in 2011.
In a column entitled “Bush’s toxic legacy in Iraq,” terrorism expert Peter Bergen writes about the origins of ISIS, “the brutal insurgent/terrorist group formerly known as al Qaeda in Iraq.” Bergen notes that, “One of George W. Bush’s most toxic legacies is the introduction of al Qaeda into Iraq, which is the ISIS mother ship. If this wasn’t so tragic it would be supremely ironic, because before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, top Bush officials were insisting that there was an al Qaeda-Iraq axis of evil. Their claims that Saddam Hussein’s men were training members of al Qaeda how to make weapons of mass destruction seemed to be one of the most compelling rationales for the impending war.”
There was no al Qaeda-Iraq connection until the war; our invasion made it so. We have known this for nearly a decade, well before the murderous ISIS even appeared. There was no al Qaeda-Iraq connection until the war; our invasion made it so. We have known this for nearly a decade, well before the murderous ISIS even appeared. In a September 2006 New York Times article headlined “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat,” reporter Mark Mazetti informed readers of a classified National Intelligence Estimate representing the consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ the analysis cited the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology: “The Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,’ said one American intelligence official.”
The Bush Administration fought to quash its conclusions during the two years that the report was in the works. Mazetti reported, “Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.” Apparently, these were dropped from the final document, though the reference to jihadists using their training for the purpose of “exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies” as in say, Syria, remained.
At the beginning of 2005, Mazetti notes, another official US government body, the National Intelligence Council, “released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.” On the one
hand, it is impressive how well our intelligence agencies were able to predict the likely outcome of the Bush Administration’s foolhardy obsession with invading Iraq. On the other, it is beyond depressing how little these assessments have come to matter in the discussion and debate over US foreign policy.
As we know, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the other architects of the war did everything possible to intimidate, and when necessary, discredit those in the intelligence agencies who warned of the predictable consequences of war. Cheney and his deputies made repeated trips to Langley to challenge professional intelligence work and used pliant members of the media — including Robert Novak of The Washington Post and Judith Miller of The New York Times, among many, many others — to undermine the integrity of people like Joseph P. Wilson and Valerie Plame lest the truth about the administration’s lies come out. Rather incredibly, they even went so far as to ignore the incredibly detailed planning documents, created over a period of a year at a cost of $5 million by the State Department, that had a chance of providing Iraq with a stable postwar environment. Instead, they insisted on creating an occupation that generated nothing but chaos, mass murder and the terrorist victories of today.
One of the many horrific results was the decision to support Nouri al-Maliki as a potential leader of the nation. Maliki’s sectarian attacks on Sunni Muslims on behalf of his Shiite allies are the immediate cause of the current murderous situation. And his placement in that job, as Fareed Zakaria aptly notes, “was the product of a series of momentous decisions made by the Bush administration. Having invaded Iraq with a small force — what the expert Tom Ricks called ‘the worst war plan in American history’ — the administration needed to find local allies.” One could go on and on (and on and on and on) about the awful judgment — the arrogance, the corruption, the ideological obsession and the purposeful ignorance — by the Bush Administration that led to the current catastrophe. As Ezra Klein recently noted, “All this cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives.” And this is to say nothing of the destruction of our civil liberties and poisoning of our political discourse at home and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died, the millions of refugees created, the hatred inspired in the world toward the United States. But to focus exclusively on the administration begs an obvious question. How did they get away with it? Where were the watchdogs of the press? Much has been written on this topic. No one denies that the truth was available at the time. Not all of it, of course, but enough to know that certain catastrophe lay down the road the administration chose to travel at 100 miles per hour. Top journalists, like those who ran the Times and The Washington Post, chose to ignore the reporting they read in their own papers. As the Post itself later reported, its veteran intelligence reporter Walter Pincus authored a compelling story that undermined the Bush administration’s claim to have proof that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. It only made the paper at all because Bob Woodward, who was researching a book, talked his editors into it. And even then, it ran on page A17, where it was immediately forgotten. As former Post Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks later explained, “Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: ‘Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?” The New York Times ran similarly regretful stories and its editors noted to its readers that the paper had been “perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper.” (Bill Moyers’ documentary special “Buying the War: How Big Media Failed Us tells the story, and in conjunction with that Moyers report, you can find an Interactive Timeline as well as post-March 2003 coverage of Iraq.) Many in the mainstream media came clean, relatively speaking, about the cause of their mistakes when it turned out that they had been conduits for the Bush administration lies that led to catastrophe. But what they haven’t done, apparently, is change their ways. As my “Altercation” colleague Reed Richardson notes, the very same people who sold us the war are today trying to resell us the same damaged goods: “On MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ this past Monday, there was Paul Bremer, the man who summarily disbanded the Iraqi Army in 2003 in one of the biggest strategic blunders of the war, happily holding court and advocating for ‘boots on the ground.’” Not to be outdone, POLITICO had the temerity to quote Doug Feith blithely lecturing Obama about how to execute foreign policy. Don’t forget the throwback stylings of torture apologistMarc Thiessen either, who was writing speeches for Rumsfeld during the run-up to the Iraq War. On Monday, he, too, weighed in with an op-ed in the Washington Post unironically entitled “Obama’s Iraq Disaster.” Among the most egregious examples of this tendency has been rehabilitation of neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan and his frequent writing partner, the pundit and policy entrepreneur William Kristol. Back in April 2002, the two argued that “the road that leads to real security and peace” is “the road that runs through Baghdad.” In an article entitled “What to Do About Iraq,” they added that not only was it silly to believe that “American ground forces in significant number are likely to be required for success in Iraq” but also that they found it “almost impossible to imagine any outcome for the world both plausible and worse than the disease of Saddam with weapons of mass destruction. A fractured Iraq? An unsettled Kurdish situation? A difficult transition in Baghdad? These may be problems, but they are far preferable to leaving Saddam in power with his nukes, VX, and anthrax.” Recently, Kristol could be heard on ABC’s idiotically named “Powerhouse Roundtable” explaining that the problem in Iraq today was caused not by the lousy decisions for which he argued so vociferously but “by our ridiculous and total withdrawal from Iraq in 2011.” Both men made this argument over and over, and especially in Kristol’s case, often in McCarthyite terms designed to cast aspersions on the motives and patriotism of their opponents and those in the media. For his spectacular wrongness Kristol has been punished by being given columns in The Washington Post, The New York Times, andTime magazine, not to mention a regular slot on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” (These appointments came in addition to a $250,000 award from the right-wing Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation; an occasion that inspired this collection of a just a few of his greatest hits.) Recently, Kristol could be heard on ABC’s idiotically named “Powerhouse Roundtable” explaining that the problem in Iraq today was caused not by the lousy decisions for which he argued so vociferously but “by our ridiculous and total withdrawal from Iraq in 2011.” (Surprise, surprise, he did not mention that our 2011 withdrawal from Iraq was the product of the 2008 “Status of Forces” agreement negotiated by none other than President George W. Bush.) Similarly, last month, Kagan was given 12,700 words for a cover essay in the (still hawkish) New Republic entitled “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” which he used to make many of the same sorts of unsupported assertions that underlay his original misguided advice. As a result, he found himself not only celebrated in a profile in The New York Times that all but glossed over his past record, but also called in for consultations by the current President of the United States. One often reads analyses these days that grant the no-longer ignorable fact that American conservatives, especially those in control of the Republican Party, have become so obsessed by right-wing ideology and beholden to corporate cash that they have entirely lost touch both with reality and with the views of most Americans. As the famed Brookings Institution analyst Thomas Mann recently wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, “Republicans have become a radical insurgency — ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of their political opposition.” This tendency was the focus of the coverage of the shocking defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in his local primary by a man with no political experience and little money, who attributed his victory to “God act[ing] through people on my behalf,” and warns that unless more Americans heed the lessons of Jesus — as he interprets them — a new Hitler could rise again “quite easily.” These right-wing extremists have repeatedly demonstrated their contempt for the views of most Americans whether it be on economic issues, environmental issues, issues of personal, religious and sexual freedom or immigration, to name just a few, and Americans are moving away from them as a result. This is no less true, it turns out, with regard to the proposed adventurism in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East by those who sold us the first false bill of goods back in 2003. A strong majority of Americans now agree that removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq was not worth the trillions of dollars and lives lost. Barely one in six want to go back in. There is also strong opposition to military intervention in neighboring Syria. And yet not only do the same armchair warriors continue in their demands for more blood and treasure to be sacrificed on the altar of their ideological obsession with no regard whatever for Americans’desire to do the exact opposite, they remain revered by the same mainstream media that allowed them to get away with it the first time. The conservative foreign policy establishment, it needs to be said, is no less out to touch with reality — and democracy — than the tea party fanatics who control the Republican domestic agenda (and are fueled by the cash of the Koch Brothers and other billionaires who stand to profit from their victories). That so many in the media pretend otherwise, after all this time, all this death and all this money wasted, demonstrates not only contempt for their audience but utter disdain for knowledge itself.
