America is blind to reality - that's the reason why the recent decade has been so bad

SusanG reviews two extremely revealing books. The stories are frightening.

First is Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon by A.J. Rossmiller. Rosmiller was an analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency. He describes being sent to Iraq where he develops intelligence on the bad guys and hands it off to the troops who go out to pick them up. When the identified bad guys aren't there, the troops pick up anyone in the area. Those innocent individuals were then sent to abu Ghraib on the assumption that the Intelligence people and MPs at the prison would sort out the innocents from the bad guys. But at the prison, the assumption was that everyone who was sent to then was automatically guilty. The best intelligence he would send to the consumers would be kicked back by his supervisors as too pessimistic. They were looking for happy talk that agreed with their bias, not real Intelligence. Rossmiller finally quit and has now written this expose.

The second book is So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits, and the President Failed on Iraq by Greg Mitchell. Mitchell is the editor of the publishing industry's magazine, Editor & Publisher. He describes an American media that, like Rossmiller's DIA, has been going along to get along and publishing happy talk news when the truth is too harsh and negative to face. The result is an ignorant American public which gets angry when someone tries to tell them something different from what they believe. The Editors then cater to the ignorant Yahoos instead of informing them (ensuring their continued ignorance), while also rejecting all criticism of their work as coming from ignorant Yahoos. The book is a collection of six years of Gregg's columns with introductions that describe the actual situation at the time the rotten news he castigates was published.

Since 9/11 America has been flying blind. Our military forces in Iraq are afraid to look at the reality they are operating in, probably because their political masters have carefully promoted only those military officers who tell them what they want to hear. those compliant officers have institutionalized rejection of harsh truths that do not confirm the leader's beliefs. Here at home the Media has performed a similar form of self-blinding to meet the desires of the Republican Party who depends on public ignorance if they are to remain power.

The conservative Republicans cannot remain in power unless the American public is frightened and ignorant, and with control over the White House and Congress they have been able to ensure that those conditions existed. But it appears that the Republicans have swallowed their own blinding Kool-aide. A government that fakes its Intelligence cannot operate effectively in reality, which explains the Katrina disaster and the almost total failure of Republican governance. With FOX News, the Washington Times, and a totally encompassing set of propaganda outlets masquerading as News outlets they have been able to fool the American public for the last six years, but it is beginning to unravel.

The current economic situation, being spun by, among others, our illustrious President as "not a recession and not likely to become one", is another example. This comes from the guy who is so unaware of reality that he does not know that the price of gasoline is approaching $4.00 per gallon. The government does not recognize reality because they have the best experts pumping out happy talk instead of real analysis. I would not be surprised to find out that they have been "cooking" the economic data that the federal government publishes, at least around the edges. That would make the economic reports we all depend on to tell us how the Macro economy is performing little more than the same economic happy talk the financial sales people and the politicians have been feeding us.

Napoleon warned against the General who lost contact with his enemy. Such a general, operating blind, can expect to be defeated. America is in much the same situation right now. Our political leaders are unaware that accurate bad news is completely superior to inaccurate news that confirms what they want to believe, so they manipulate the news - the Intelligence - they are given. They have lost contact with reality.

Those two books SusanG reviewed are efforts to make reality impinge on the rest of us.

Rendition, torture provided fake story of Saddam training al Qaeda used to justify Iraq invasion .

Before the invasion of Iraq, Frontline offered a show that purported to prove that Saddam was training al Qaeda terrorists at a special training facility south of Baghdad. The same "Intelligence" as reported by the CIA was included in Colin Powell's unfortunate address to the UN before the Iraq invasion.

This so-called Intelligence was a result of the CIA's rendition program, in which ibn al Sheik al Libi, previously the commander of an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, was interrogated for Intelligence. This was what happened:

Under torture after his rendition to Egypt, al Libi had provided a confession of how Saddam Hussein had been training al Qaeda in chemical weapons. This evidence was used by Colin Powell at the United Nations a year earlier (February 2003) to justify the war in Iraq. ("I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al Qaeda," Powell said. "Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.")

But now, hearing how the information was obtained, the CIA was soon to retract all this intelligence. A Feb. 5 cable records that al Libi was told by a "foreign government service" (Egypt) that: "the next topic was al-Qa'ida's connections with Iraq...This was a subject about which he said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story."

Al Libi indicated that his interrogators did not like his responses and then "placed him in a small box approximately 50cm X 50cm [20 inches x 20 inches]." He claimed he was held in the box for approximately 17 hours. When he was let out of the box, al Libi claims that he was given a last opportunity to "tell the truth." When al Libi did not satisfy the interrogator, al Libi claimed that "he was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and he fell on his back." Al Libi told CIA debriefers that he then "was punched for 15 minutes." (Sourced to CIA cable, Feb. 5, 2004).

Here was a cable then that informed Washington that one of the key pieces of evidence for the Iraq war -- the al Qaeda/Iraq link -- was not only false but extracted by effectively burying a prisoner alive.

As Naval SERE instructor and Intelligence interrogator Malcolm Nance has pointed out, torture (like water boarding) Does not provide reliable Intelligence! A person subject to torture will say anything just to get it to stop and Interrogators have no way of knowing what is true and what is not. The subject of torture is simply looking for whatever story will satisfy his torturer.

Malcolm Nance is going to testify before a Congressional Hearing soon about the way the training from the Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program was "reverse-engineered" to provide torture techniques for CIA Interrogators to use. Here is an important part of what he will say:

...subcommittee members will get an earful about the unacceptability of reverse-engineering SERE torture-resistance techniques in order to design torture regimens to use on detainees in the war on terrorism.

"Our body of experience shows a friendly approach is most successful" in interrogation, Nance says. SERE's historical memory goes back to the French and Indian Wars in understanding torture methods that captured U.S. troops might face and devising strategies to resist them. He relates the story of Hans Joachim Scharff, a master Luftwaffe interrogator who spurned abusive techniques used by the Gestapo (also, interestingly, termed "enhanced interrogation") in favor of rapport-building. Scharff's legendary success is still studied by U.S. interrogators. Unfortunately, he says, "after Guantanamo, I thought, how can anyone at SERE ever teach the Geneva Conventions again?"

A trove of accumulated institutional familiarity with torture led to a slide that Nance shares, from an old (and unclassified) SERE PowerPoint presentation to trainees. It asks outright, "Why Is Torture The Worst Interrogation Method?" The first answer: "Produces Unreliable Information."

Nance remarks, "Two centuries of knowledge were thrown out the window" when the administration decided after 9/11 that, to use Cofer Black's famous phrase, "the gloves come off." What administration officials mistakenly thought, Nance says, is that "these were actually gloves, not empirical data. Dude, it's not a glove. It's a fact. But they thought it was one more tool in the tool box."

The result, Nance says, is that al-Qaeda now has, essentially, its own SERE school in U.S. detention facilities, as released detainees have given numerous accounts of their interrogations. What's more, he warns that the world is about to see an uptick in the use of torture as "cops in Bogota, everyone" now believes that the U.S. has lent torture its imprimatur -- or, at least, isn't in a credible position to criticize foreign countries' human rights abuses. He says he's testifying in part to help his old comrades in SERE, which he sees as a vital tool for training U.S. troops. "SERE needs to be increased," Nance insists, "but what needs to be stopped is the transfer of SERE techniques to official interrogations."

The pro-torture Republicans can't argue with what his testimony will be and what the history is. Torture doesn't provide good Intelligence. So expect the Republican questions to focus on his qualification and the basis for his testimony.

Ah, yes. FBI to build an American Stasi.

Not familiar with the word "Stasi?" That was the East German secret police; it kept files on 5 million East Germans -- a third of the population -- and infiltrated the West German military and government. If you were an East German you never knew which of your friends, neighbors, or even relatives was getting paid by the Stasi to report on you.

Of course, those people were supplementing their meager incomes, and didn't get paid if they didn't provide reports. Interesting reports. Sometimes they just had to make stuff up to get paid. If you think the misinformation that resides in your credit file is bad, it is nothing compared to what was in the Stasi files. Or, for that matter, what may already be in your FBI file.

Well, guess what? The FBI is asking Congress for funding for its own version of the Stasi networks and files. Justin Rood, over at The Blotter of ABC News, reports the story.

The FBI is taking cues from the CIA to recruit thousands of covert informants in the United States as part of a sprawling effort to boost its intelligence capabilities.

According to a recent unclassified report to Congress, the FBI expects its informants to provide secrets about possible terrorists and foreign spies, although some may also be expected to aid with criminal investigations, in the tradition of law enforcement confidential informants. The FBI did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

The FBI said the push was driven by a 2004 directive from President Bush ordering the bureau to improve its counterterrorism efforts by boosting its human intelligence capabilities.

The aggressive push for more secret informants appears to be part of a new effort to grow its intelligence and counterterrorism efforts. Other recent proposals include expanding its collection and analysis of data on U.S. persons, retaining years' worth of Americans' phone records and even increasing so-called "black bag" secret entry operations.

To handle the increase in so-called human sources, the FBI also plans to overhaul its database system, so it can manage records and verify the accuracy of information from "more than 15,000" informants, according to the document. [Bolding in original - Editor, WTF-o]

The best hope for Americans is that the FBI continues true to form. They have never successfully managed an Intelligence program, and their last three efforts to improve their computer systems have had to be abandoned as failures. America may well be lucky that those efforts only cost billions of dollars. Things could have been a lot worse if they had worked.

Whatever - this is one more effort to turn America into an authoritarian nation. Someone recently asked if I thought that the Republicans would put this much effort into creating an authoritarian nation controlled by the President with no checks and balances, then quietly turn the results over to someone like Hillary Clinton in January 2009.

That is a very scary question. The smirk on Alberto Gonzales' face as he lied (again) to the Senate leaves me suspecting the worst.

CIA to declassify, release unflattering historical documents

This should be fascinating.

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.

"Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA's history," Hayden said in a speech to a conference of foreign policy historians.

Some of it has come out over the years, of course. This should make the agency somewhat more transparent for control purposes.

On the opposite side of the issue, no major nation can afford to try to operate without an effective Intelligence Agency. This is going to be ancient history, not anything current. That in my opinion is as it should be. You don't want to give away current sources and methods, but you don't want the people in the bureaucracy of the CIA to believe that their decisions will never be known, either. This should provide that transparency so that we Americans know what has being done in our name. With luck, the historical research that will result will lead to more effective Intelligence gathering and analysis methods.

For example, I'd bet this will permit the first outside review of what happened when the CIA tried to focus almost entirely on technical Intelligence gathering and supplemented that with Human Intelligence from allied nation Intelligence agencies.

If nothing else, it is going to be interesting.

Side note: I wonder if this is designed to take some heat off the Bush administration as the news is filled with events that happened decades in the past?