Informed Comment

Below is a transcript of an interview by Eliot Spitzer on CNN’s “In the Arena” with Glenn Carle and Juan Cole concerning the Bush White House/ CIA attempt to destroy Cole’s reputation. I think Carle adds some new details and texture to his account beyond what was in James Risen’s NYT piece.

Let me quote here the passage at the bottom, from me, right up front:

And it’s just impossible for me to believe that the White House asked the CIA to Google me; that they were just passing along publicly available information. There must have been an implication that they should actively dig up some kind of dirt. And that is illegal and it’s extremely troubling, and I believe that the Senate Intelligence Committee, the House Intelligence Committee should open investigations, should subpoena documents, should get names, should find out what was going on, who the request came from at the White House, what’s the background of this.

I think Eric Holder, at the Department of Justice, should look into it. And I think that unless we get to the bottom of this story, we can’t be sure that there weren’t others so targeted, that other people were perhaps — their reputation was ruined for political purposes.

And we also — to tell you the truth, we can’t be sure there aren’t black cells inside the CIA that continue to behave in these ways. I mean, I think we really need to shake things up here and get to the bottom of this.

Spitzer at the end notes the CIA’s denial of Carle’s and Risen’s story (Risen has other sources besides Carle who however declined to be named). The denial is clearly dishonest and seems mainly concerned with reassuring other experts that by agreeing to speak to intelligence analysts in DC they are not thereby putting themselves under surveillance! I’d be sorry if this fiasco dried up open sources for the US intelligence community, which is often too stovepiped and inward-looking as it is.

Here is the full transcript:

CNN

June 17, 2011 Friday

SHOW: IN THE ARENA 8:00 PM EST

Bush White House Asked CIA to Gather Information on College Professor; Interview With Robert Reich

BYLINE: Eliot Spitzer, Richard Quest, Diana Magnay

GUESTS: Glenn Carle, Juan Cole, Steve Kornacki, Reihan Salam, Robert Reich, James Traub…

HIGHLIGHT: CIA gathered damaging information on an American college professor on orders from the Bush White House.

HOST: Good evening. Welcome to the program. I’m Eliot Spitzer.

Tonight — a story that smacks of the Watergate era, a tale fit for Woodward and Bernstein., explosive allegations that the CIA gathered damaging information on an American college professor on orders from the Bush White House, this because the professor’s views were critical of Bush administration policies. Sounds un-American, doesn’t it? We’ll have an exclusive interview in just a moment…

SPITZER: …

Tonight, in covert action, did the Bush White House use the CIA to spy on an American citizen who was a critic of the Iraq war? It’s a scary charge. The critic in question is Juan Cole, a controversial history professor at the University of Michigan who often wrote about his unfavorable views of Bush administration policies.

The person allegedly asked to do the spying but says he refused is Glenn Carle, the 23-year veteran of the CIA who rose to the senior ranks of the agency. He says White House officials wanted, quoting here, “to get Juan Cole.”

Glenn Carle is the CIA officer in question. He joins me for an exclusive interview. After he tells his story, Professor Juan Cole will join the conversation.

Welcome.

Glenn, let me start with you. You were asked to do something that you believed and is in fact illegal. Tell us what happened, how the request was made to you, and what followed thereafter.

GLENN CARLE, FORMER CIA OFFICER: Sometime late in 2005, I don’t remember the exact dates, it is a while ago. But sometime late in 2005, my superior returned from a meeting at the White House and called me into his office and asked me if I knew about Professor Juan Cole, who was he. I said, of course, I know who he is. We had worked together on National Intelligence Council business a number of times and then started to ask questions about lifestyle and background, in saying what you just summarized that the White House found him a severe critic and wanted to get him and I was flabbergasted.

SPITZER: You objected to the request to get Juan — to get Professor Cole and you nonetheless saw a few days later that this effort appeared to be continuing. Describe that for us.

CARLE: The following morning there was a staff meeting I had to attend. Details I can spare I think. But in attending the meeting, I had to carry a memorandum that was going to be routed to the White House I believe it was. And although I don’t know the people to whom it was destined, I do not know that.

And in this memorandum was a note on Professor Cole as I recall, four paragraphs long, describing him, his personal life. Not that he thought the Shia were doing this or the Shia were doing, or Hezbollah was this. The substance of what interested him for the National Intelligence Council, but about his personal behavior and taste and practices.

Only one of the paragraphs was objectionable. But I was stunned. So, I took it to the acting chairman of the National Intelligence Council immediately and said this is really very disturbing. You need to know about this. You need to take some action because it’s beyond my power to stop this.

He immediately did. He said watch me.

SPITZER: And was that David Gordon? Again, I know you’re hesitant to mention — was that David Gordon?

CARLE: Yes. David Gordon was the acting chairman, yes.

SPITZER: OK.

CARLE: And he — in front of me, scratched out the offending paragraph of that memorandum.

SPITZER: Now, there’s no question in your mind the memo that you read one paragraph of which you found objectionable was responsive — would have been responsive to the request to get information to get Professor Cole. This is what somebody had crafted and prepared in response to that sort of request.

CARLE: It was a response to a request for personal information about Professor Juan Cole, yes.

SPITZER: Not substantive information about his views about the Iraq war or Middle Eastern affairs but personal information that would have been deemed derogatory, somehow critical or somehow useful in an effort to discredit?

CARLE: Well, who is Juan Cole, the man, and to include inappropriate personal assessments of him or behaviors he would engage in. None of which I recall whatsoever.

SPITZER: And, clearly, just to complete the circle, David Gordon must have agreed with you because as you say –

CARLE: Absolutely.

SPITZER: — he X’ed out one of the paragraphs, coming to the same conclusion you did that it was not appropriate information to be passing along.

CARLE: Oh, absolutely. I knew him to be an outstanding professional and man of judgment and he also was the man in charge. And that’s why I went to him, telling him he needed to know about this, he needed to take measures to stop it because I was aware of this and I was unable to stop this sort of thing. And he said never, ever, would he have involvement in something like that and he would see to it that it was stopped.

SPITZER: Now, was there a further instance where you got the sense or direct evidence that there was an effort to get information about Professor Cole?

CARLE: Well, the answer is yes. One could have thought this was the episode we just talked about. This is an aberration, sort of strange and misunderstanding end of story. But a number of months later, I was about to have lunch with a colleague of mine who said, Glenn, take a look at this. He showed me an e-mail to him seeking guidance from a concerned or troubled more junior officer saying, how do I respond to this? This is bizarre — essentially was the inquiry.

This is a person that my colleague was mentoring and the request was from, as the article describes, from the front office of the agency for personal information that anybody knew about Professor Juan Cole. And I just — there I thought my goodness. This is inconceivable. This is really not just an aberration. So, I took steps, forcible as I could, to try to stop it and within my circle of knowledge, I think that I succeeded. But I, of course, don’t know what’s beyond it.

SPITZER: Can you tell us to whom you reported this at the point when you saw the second incident? Clearly, you must have concluded this was not one-off, this was not one aberrant misstep. This was a continuing course of conduct. Can you tell us to whom you reported it and therefore what paper trail or what evidence should be there to corroborate the story?

CARLE: Yes. Well, there is — you know, CIA officers don’t their work home and I have no documents or proof whatsoever. It’s just my word against the institution and other individuals, of course, which is unfortunate possibly from me. But I’m telling — everything I’m telling is exactly the truth in what happened.

There were e-mails, however, and other individuals, colleagues of mine, have said to me that they remember the events as I do, but they are unwilling to speak.

SPITZER: As you just said, this will ultimately become a test of your credibility versus the credibility of those in the agency who may want to dismiss this. So, let me just sort of lay the foundation and probe a little bit. How many years did you spend in the CIA?

CARLE: Twenty-three — well, almost 23 years I served. Full career.

SPITZER: What was the most senior position that you attained, the — your highest position there?

CARLE: Yes, I had somewhat unusual career. But I was actually an operations officer, clandestine services officer. So, most of my career, I was undercover and I was doing things I can’t really speak about.

But that’s what I did. And until my last position, which was the most senior one, to answer your question, and there I was the deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats — a long winded term for senior most analytical position on terrorists analysis.

SPITZER: So, in the end, to put this into parlance, so we can understand, you went from being James Bond to Q.

(LAUGHTER)

CARLE: No, not Q. Q makes funny gizmos and so on. Jack, what he’s face from Tom Clancy novels, without the operational status.

(CROSSTALK)

SPITZER: All right. Just so we understand what you were doing.

But you left the agency on your own terms. You were not dismissed? You were not fired? There was no ongoing litigation between you and the agency?

CARLE: No. I retired, normal retirement.

SPITZER: Do you have any reason to believe there are other instances of inquiries such as the one we’ve been discussing that — you know, where the agency was asked to gather information that could be used to injure somebody’s reputation?

CARLE: Yes. Well, of course, this is the question that “The New York Times” asked me and everyone asks and would like the answer to. I have spoken to the facts that I lived them. I only know the incident concerning Professor Cole as I — as we’ve summarized it today. I don’t know what happened beyond my knowledge or sight or professional activities.

SPITZER: Do you — you know these facts. You lived them as you just said. Do you believe those facts constitute illegal behavior, the request, and the effort to gather information through the agency that could be used to damage a U.S. citizens reputation?

CARLE: Well, this is why I was shocked and why I took the steps that I did, why I said I was flabbergasted, and I hurried around the building looking for the person to challenge about it because it smothers milk in the agency. Executive order 12333, American — not American — the CIA has nothing to do with, doesn’t spy on, doesn’t collect information on, do anything concerning American citizens, unless there’s a very rigorous protocol followed.

That was not the case in this instance. This is personal information unrelated to a national security issue, and it’s clearly something that the CIA cannot engage in.

And all of my colleagues and I know that.

SPITZER: Professor Cole, I apologize. You have been more the innocent bystander in this conversation. But, obviously, what the CIA did is core of this problem.

Having heard this, having read the stories that have emerged over the last few days, what do you believe should happen to be — what should be done to pursue and investigate this?

JUAN COLE: Well, it’s clearly extremely improper and illegal for — even for the paragraphs that may have been sent over which were unobjectionable about an American citizen, the CIA shouldn’t be telling the White House about an American citizen.

And it’s just impossible for me to believe that the White House asked the CIA to Google me; that they were just passing along publicly available information. There must have been an implication that they should actively dig up some kind of dirt. And that is illegal and it’s extremely troubling, and I believe that the Senate Intelligence Committee, the House Intelligence Committee should open investigations, should subpoena documents, should get names, should find out what was going on, who the request came from at the White House, what’s the background of this.

I think Eric Holder, at the Department of Justice, should look into it. And I think that unless we get to the bottom of this story, we can’t be sure that there weren’t others so targeted, that other people were perhaps — their reputation was ruined for political purposes.

And we also — to tell you the truth, we can’t be sure there aren’t black cells inside the CIA that continue to behave in these ways. I mean, I think we really need to shake things up here and get to the bottom of this.

SPITZER: All right. Juan Cole, Glenn Carle, thank you so much for joining us.

CARLE: Thank you.

SPITZER: We’ve received a response to the allegations made by former CIA officer Glenn Carle and Professor Juan Cole.

The CIA spokesman says and I quote here, “We’ve thoroughly researched our records and any allegation that the CIA provided private or derogatory information on Professor Cole to anyone is simply wrong. We value the insights of outside experts, including respected academics, who follow many of the same national security policies that we do.”

Posted in Iraq War, US Politics | 6 Comments

Eminent National Security correspondent at the New York Times James Risen has been told by a retired former official of the Central Intelligence Agency that the Bush White House repeatedly asked the CIA to spy on me with a view to discovering “damaging” information with which to discredit my reputation. Glenn Carle says he was called into the office of his superior, David Low, in 2005 and was asked of me, “ ‘What do you think we might know about him, or could find out that could discredit him?’ ”

Low actually wrote up a brief attempt in this direction and submitted it to the White House but Carle says he intercepted it. Carle later discovered that yet another young analyst had been tasked with looking into me.

It seems to me clear that the Bush White House was upset by my blogging of the Iraq War, in which I was using Arabic and other primary sources, and which contradicted the propaganda efforts of the administration attempting to make the enterprise look like a wild shining success.

Carle’s revelations come as a visceral shock. You had thought that with all the shennanigans of the CIA against anti-Vietnam war protesters and then Nixon’s use of the agency against critics like Daniel Ellsberg, that the Company and successive White Houses would have learned that the agency had no business spying on American citizens.

I believe Carle’s insider account and discount the glib denials of people like Low. Carle is taking a substantial risk in making all this public. I hope that the Senate and House Intelligence Committees will immediately launch an investigation of this clear violation of the law by the Bush White House and by the CIA officials concerned. Like Mr. Carle, I am dismayed at how easy it seems to have been for corrupt WH officials to suborn CIA personnel into activities that had nothing to do with national security abroad and everything to do with silencing domestic critics. This effort was yet another attempt to gut the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, in this case as part of an effort to gut the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

I should point out that my blog was begun in 2002 with an eye toward analyzing open source information on the struggle against al-Qaeda. In 2003 I also began reporting on the unfolding Iraq War. My goal was to help inform the public and to present sources and analysis on the basis of my expertise as a Middle East and South Asia expert. In 2003-2005 and after I on a few occasions was asked to speak to military and intelligence professionals, most often as part of an inter-agency audience, and I presented to them in person distillations of my research. I never had a direct contract with the CIA, but some of the think tanks that every once in a while asked me to speak were clearly letting analysts and field officers know about the presentations (which were most often academic panels of a sort that would be mounted at any academic conference), and they attended. I should underline that these presentations involved small travel expenses and a small honorarium, and that I wasn’t a high-paid consultant but clearly was expected to speak my views and share my conclusions frankly. It was not a regular gig. Apparently one of the purposes of spying on me to discredit me, from the point of view of the Bush White House, was ironically to discourage Washington think tanks from inviting me to speak to the analysts, not only of the CIA but also the State Department Intelligence and Research and other officials concerned with counter-terrorism and with Iraq.

It seemed likely to some colleagues, according to what they told me, that the Bush administration had in fact succeeded in having me blackballed, since the invitations rather dropped off, and panels of a sort I had earlier participated in were being held without my presence. I do not know if smear tactics were used to produce this result, behind the scenes and within the government. It was all the same to me– I continued to provide what I believe was an important service to the Republic at my blog and I know for a fact that not only intelligence analysts but members of the Bush team continued to read some of what I wrote.

What alarms me most of all in the nakedly illegal deployment of the CIA against an academic for the explicit purpose of destroying his reputation for political purposes is that I know I am a relatively small fish and it seems to me rather likely that I was not the only target of the baleful team at the White House. After the Valerie Plame affair, it seemed clear that there was nothing those people wouldn’t stoop to. You wonder how many critics were effectively “destroyed.” It is sad that a politics of personal destruction was the response by the Bush White House to an attempt of a citizen to reason in public about a matter of great public interest. They have brought great shame upon the traditions of the White House, which go back to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, who had hoped that checks and balances would forestall such abuses of power.

Posted in Iraq War, US Politics | 127 Comments

This poster at reddit.com compares the various costs of Bush’s illegal war in Iraq to those of the UN /NATO intervention in Libya (which is not illegal in internationaL law) and asks you to guess which one Republicans are angry about.

Posted in Iraq War, Libya | Comments Off

What is it about the United States that makes for harsh prosecutions over sex crimes but lets leaders off the hook when it comes to war crimes? New York police rushed to arrest Dominique Strauss-Kahn , the head of the international Monetary Fund, on Saturday on learning of charges against him by a hotel maid of sexual assault. This quick action against a wealthy and powerful individual, seeking justice for a person at the bottom rung of the American social hierarchy, is praiseworthy. It affirms the principle that no one is above the law.

But the widows and orphans of Iraq cannot hope that the New York police would similarly frog-march George W. Bush off his first-class flight and arrest him for crimes against humanity.

Glenn Greenwald argues that the lessons of the Nuremberg trials have been forgotten and that Bush and other members of his administration should be tried for war crimes. His piece builds on earlier journalism on this subject, such as that of Jan Frel. Not only should Bush and his cronies be tried for launching an aggressive war, but many jurists want them tried for crimes against humanity such as torture, in which they have admitted engaging.

The US and other United Nations members are signatories to the United Nations Charter, which as a treaty has the force of law. Chapter 7 of the UN charter forbids war except under two conditions: 1) Self-defense or, 2) a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing war against a regime that is posing a threat to international order.

Chaper 7, article 51 says,

“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”

Chapter 7, Article 42, says, after describing in article 41 economic boycotts and other non-military measures against rogue states:

Should the Security Council consider that measures provided for in Article 41 would be inadequate or have proved to be inadequate, it may take such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security. Such action may include demonstrations, blockade, and other operations by air, sea, or land forces of Members of the United Nations.

Bush had neither pretext for an Iraq War but prosecuted that war nevertheless. I.e., his war was neither self-defense nor did it have a UNSC resolution behind it affirming that invading Iraq was necessary to preserving international order. Bush’s was a lawless war of naked aggression that has left hundreds of thousands dead.

Like Frel, Greenwald quotes Benjamin Ferencz, a nonagenarian former Nuremberg prosecutor, who repeats and underlines the point that aggressive warfare is the chief human rights crime, since all other crimes committed in the course of the war issue from this decision.

I’ve been surprised to discover that many of my readers do not appear to understand that the US has treaty obligations under the UN charter, and do not know that the charter only allows war under these two conditions. The US invoked the UN framework in Korea, in the Gulf War, and in Libya, and it offers our best hope for moving beyond an international jungle where the strong fall upon the weak at will. President Eisenhower explicitly rejected the 1956 war of Britain, France and Israel on Egypt on the grounds that it was a war of aggression that violated the stipulations of Chapter 7 of the UN Charter.

I agree entirely with Greenwald that it is dangerous to let members of the Bush administration off the hook for their war crimes (which go beyond the initial transgression of launching a war of aggression with no UNSC sanction). There is no difference in principle between what Bush and Cheney did and what Slobodan Milosevic did, except that we live in a hypocritical world of victor’s justice. To shield the rich and powerful makes a mockery of Chapter 7.

But I would argue that it is precisely the contrast between an action like the UNSC-sanctioned intervention in Libya and Bush-Cheney’s cowboy invasion and occupation of Iraq that helps underline how criminal the latter enterprise was.

The body that could most easily gather evidence against Bush, Cheney and others in that administration and begin the process of subpoenas is the two houses of the US Congress. But the Democratic-dominated Senate has openly eschewed prosecution. And the Republican-controlled House of Representatives would resist such a move on partisan grounds. The documentary evidence for criminal activity would surely not be so hard for our national legislature to get hold of, if the will existed to do the right thing. President Eisenhower did not hesitate to defend the UN Charter even against close allies. His like, unfortunately, would be hard to find in American politics today.

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Jon Stewart of the Daily Show makes fun of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Doug Feith and other figures from the Bush administration to take credit for the demise of Usama Bin Laden.

In fact, of course, they ran off to illegally invade and ruin Iraq and invested hundreds of billions of dollars in that white elephant. Obama got Bin Laden because that was the number one thing Obama wanted.

Posted in Iraq War, US Politics | Comments Off

An American president, himself the son of a Muslim father and a Christian mother, has taken down notorious terrorist Usama Bin Laden. Despite being a Christian, Obama, it seems to me, had a personal stake in destroying someone who had defamed the religion of his birth father and his relatives. His 2007-2008 presidential campaign was in part about the need of the US to refocus on the threat from al-Qaeda. He said that the Bush administration had taken its eye off the ball by running off to Iraq to pursue an illegal war and neglecting the eastern front, from which the US had been attacked, and where riposting was legitimate in international law. Obama began threatening to act unilaterally against al-Qaeda in Pakistan in August 2007, during the early period of the Democratic primary.

Ironically, Obama had to admit that Pakistani intelligence helped the US develop the lead that allowed the US to close in on Bin Laden. So the operation was not unilateral, and young candidate Obama was too over-confident. The US story that the Pakistanis were not given prior notice of the operation is contradicted by the Pakistani news channel Geo, which says that Pakistani troops and plainsclothesmen helped cordon off the compound in Abbotabad. CNN is pointing out that US helicopters could not have flown so far into Pakistan from Afghanistan without tripping Pakistani radar. My guess is that the US agreed to shield the government of Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and President Asaf Ali Zardari from al-Qaeda reprisals by putting out the story that the operation against Bin Laden was solely a US one. And it may be that suspect elements of the Pakistani elite, such as the Inter-Services Intelligence, were kept out the the loop because it was feared they might have ties to Bin Laden and might tip him off.

Usama Bin Laden was a violent product of the Cold War and the Age of Dictators in the Greater Middle East. He passed from the scene at a time when the dictators are falling or trying to avoid falling in the wake of a startling set of largely peaceful mass movements demanding greater democracy and greater social equity. Bin Laden dismissed parliamentary democracy, for which so many Tunisians and Egyptians yearn, as a man-made and fallible system of government, and advocated a return to the medieval Muslim caliphate (a combination of pope and emperor) instead. Only a tiny fringe of Muslims wants such a theocratic dictatorship. The masses who rose up this spring mainly spoke of “nation,” the “people,” “liberty” and “democracy,” all keywords toward which Bin Laden was utterly dismissive. The notorious terrorist turned to techniques of fear-mongering and mass murder to attain his goals in the belief that these methods were the only means by which the Secret Police States of the greater Middle East could be overturned.

Dr Wahid Abd-al-Majid, an adviser at the Al-Ahram Center for Political Studies, spoke to al-Arabiya on April 15 about al-Qaeda no. 2 leader (and now no. 1) Ayman al-Zawahiri’s dismissive statement that all the Egyptian uprising had produced was an untrustworthy military junta. Since Egypt is moving toward parliamentary elections, al-Zawahiri’s description is a caricature. Abd al-Majid, said, “Al-Zawahiri wanted to declare a stance on what is happening in Egypt, especially when he saw the end of the road for Al-Qa’ida and religious violence, or violence that hides behind religion, in Egypt, because what the Egyptians accomplished peacefully negates any need or justification for violence in Egypt. Al-Zawahiri dreamt of being the one who topples President Husni Mubarak, only for the president to be toppled by the youth in a peaceful and democratic revolution that has absolutely no connection to Al-Qa’ida’s long-held claims.” (USG Open Source Center translation).

The son of a Yemeni immigrant to Saudi Arabia who went from rags to riches by doing construction and engineering work for the Saudi royal family, Usama Bin Laden grew up one of dozens of sons of a billionaire, in an absolute monarchy which maintains that the holy Qur’an itself is its only constitution. It wasn’t a system that dealt well with rebelliousness or dissent.

Unlike most of the Bin Ladens, who are worldly business-people (a niece, Wafa, posed provocatively for GQ) Usama was known as a serious and religious young man. At university in Jeddah he probably came under the influence of Abdullah Azzam, a radical Muslim fundamentalist of Palestinian heritage.

The Palestine issue helped radicalize Bin Laden. He and his circle in Afghanistan were obsessed with the Israeli occupation of Islam’s third holiest site, Jerusalem, and gave one another sermons about what they saw as a modern crusade against Muslims in that city. The perfidy of successive British governments in conquering Palestine, agreeing to its becoming a Class A League of Nations Mandate (i.e. a nation-state in training), but at the same time giving Palestine away to the international Zionist movement, had resulted in the end in the ethnic cleansing of most Palestinians and their reduction to the status of stateless refugees. But the religious Usama seemed to care most of all about the 1967 Israeli military occupation of all of Jerusalem, including the Muslim holy site of the Dome of the Rock. Although Israel may have been a democracy for Israelis, it was a foreign military occupying power in the Palestinian West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and ruled there with an iron fist.

In 1978, young officers made a Communist coup in Afghanistan. By fall of 1979 the enterprise had turned unstable because of faction-fighting among the officers. In December of 1979 Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev, perhaps baited by the Carter administration, sent in Soviet troops and began a brutal 8-year occupation of among the least developed and most poverty-stricken countries in the world.

The Reagan administration and the Democratic Congress took the small Carter administration program that supported a Muslim insurgency against the Soviets in Afghanistan and vastly expanded it, ultimately to the tune of billions of dollars. Reagan also twisted the arm of Saudi King Fahd to match US expenditures. Seven major Afghan guerrilla groups were fostered and given CIA training in camps. The Soviets fought back viciously. In that decade, perhaps a million Afghans were killed, 3 million were displaced to Pakistan, 2 million were displaced to Iran, and 2 million were displaced inside Afghanistan. In a country of, at that time, perhaps 15 million persons. It was Apocalypse Now, Kabul version. The two opponents were not attractive. The Communist regime was a cruel dictatorship. The Mujahidin were a mix of tribal and religious forces, but some groups were radical fundamentalists, as with the Hizb-i Islami or Islamic Party of Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, the most bloodthirsty of the Mujahidin. He got a lion’s share of the CIA money (he is today a die-hard opponent of the US whose men have killed many US troops in Afghanistan).

When Reagan convinced King Fahd to help get up a covert paramilitary to fight the Soviets (Reagan really liked private, unaccountable militias; he also backed them in Central America), Fahd had his ministers look around for a fundraiser who could get money from private sources in Saudi Arabia for the Arab volunteers to fight in Afghanistan. Usama Bin Laden was chosen, being a well-known socialite who also had a serious and religious side. Bin Laden jetted back and forth between the mosques of Saudi Arabia and the the Pakistani city of Peshawar, his headquarters in the struggle against the Soviets. The “Arab Afghans” who gathered around him may not have gotten direct CIA training for the most part, though some likely did, but they learned everything they needed to know about setting up cells and carrying out covert operations from the Afghans who had been through the CIA schools.

The Soviets completely withdrew from Afghanistan in late 1988 through early 1989. Soon thereafter, the Soviet bloc began collapsing.

Bin Laden was left without a task there in Afghanistan, and he returned to Jedda in Saudi Arabia. He gave a guest sermon at his mosque on the first Palestinian Intifada or uprising, and already had begun turning on his former ally, the United States, whom he blamed for enabling Israeli repression of the Palestinians. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Bin Laden suggested to King Fahd that he be allowed to gather together his old gang of Arab Afghans to push Saddam back out. King Fahd wisely rejected the idea of having a bunch of scruffy Mujahidin crawling all over his country. The crisis had been provoked by a Baathist president-for-life, Saddam Hussein, another dictator acting arbitrarily. That Fahd instead brought in non-Muslim Westerners to do the job stuck in Bin Laden’s craw. A couple of years later he went to the Sudan and began his career as a terrorist. Then the US pressured Sudan to expel him, and he went to Afghanistan. He initially hooked up with his old Mujahidin buddies, but he was introduced to Mulla Omar, leader of the Taliban, and ultimately became very close to him.

They were all dictatorships– the Soviet Union, the Communist government of Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Sudan, and the Taliban. Usama learned to take the law into his own hands because he had no other way to effect change. He wanted to see the region’s dictatorship overthrown in favor of his renewed Islamic Caliphate. It was a crackpot, fringe, pipe dream, but he brought to the aspiration all the experiences and training he and his men had learned during the Reagan Jihad against the Soviets. Then he and his number two man, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, came to the conclusion that the reason they could not overthrow the governments of Egypt (Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship) and Saudi Arabia and so forth was that these were backed by the United States. They decided it had been a mistake to hit the “near enemy” first. They decided to hit the “far enemy” on American soil. Bin Laden thought that if only he could entice the US into the Middle East, he could do to it what he thought he had done to the Soviet Union.

Hence the horrific attacks on the US of September 11, 2001.

It was those attacks that created Informed Comment. I started it in spring of 2002 initially to cover al-Qaeda and to present analysis about how to defeat it. Like all Americans, I was personally devastated by September 11. I was depressed for a year. I felt it in distinctive ways because I had lived nearly 10 years in the Greater Middle East. Most of that time I was a student or, later on, academic researcher. But although I studied history, I was living in the present. I had been in Egypt in the late 1970s when Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad began becoming notorious. I lived in Pakistan off and on in the early 1980s and went up to Peshawar and talked with Mujahidin.

I supported the first phase of the Afghanistan War, which involved a light Western footprint in that country. There were 40 al-Qaeda training camps, which produced thousands of potential terrorists, and if they had not been destroyed they would have gone on manufacturing threats to the US. I discovered that there was a lot of good information on the Arabic internet about al-Qaeda, and I paraphrased the reports I thought significant. I began being invited to private security conferences in Washington, sponsored by think tanks at the request of government agencies, where the audience was typically inter-agency. There, I presented my analyses of al-Qaeda along with other academics and security experts. I hoped that the insights might be useful to State Department, Pentagon, CIA, DIA and other officials on the front lines of dismantling al-Qaeda. I had opposed the Vietnam War, something that had been painful for my father, who was a 20-year man in the army. But if the US government could benefit from my studies of al-Qaeda and other radical fringe movements trying to hurt Americans, I was just delighted.

(Just a note: I often challenged Washington orthodoxies, the honoraria were small, and I was only invited a few times a year, so the suggestion of some of my detractors that I sold out by doing these presentations is frankly silly. I just want my government to be as informed as it can be, and I’ll tell them the same things I tell the peace groups who also invite me to speak. If I had wanted to sell out, I could have formed a consultancy and purveyed the party line and made big bucks).

I was deeply dismayed when it became apparent that the Bush administration intended to use September 11 as a pretext to launch an illegal invasion of Iraq. I thought it was most unwise, and would be seen as an act of neo-imperialism and resisted. I told friends that if the UN Security Council voted against it, and Bush proceeded, I’d be out in the streets protesting. But then the UNSC never really was given a chance to vote, and Bush ran off to war. I prefer peace to war, but am not a pacifist. I don’t believe the use of military force is always wrong or counter-productive. I am from an army family after all. But I do believe that wars should be like abortion: rare and legal. The UN was established after the horrors of the Axis in WW II in an attempt to deploy collective security to stop the practice of aggressive wars of conquest and annexation. President Dwight Eisenhower invoked the UN Charter when he made Britain, France and Israel withdraw from Egypt in 1956-1957. By waging a war that was neither in self-defense nor authorized by the UNSC, in contravention of the UN Charter (a treaty to which the US is signatory), W. and Dick Cheney were throwing away the achievement of the founders of the UN, and returning us to the international jungle, where the strong fall upon the weak with no framework of law.

I was also dismayed by the propagandistic way the White House promoted its war on and then occupation of Iraq. They only had two speeds, progress and slow progress. A big bombing that killed hundreds was “slow progress.” Fantastic historical analogies were trotted out. The reality was obscured. Since I know Arabic, I read the multiplying Iraqi newspapers on the web, watched Arabic satellite t.v., developed correspondents in Iraq, and tried to describe the situation more realistically at this blog. Interestingly, I still got invited to Washington to speak to audiences of security and intelligence personnel. Then-senator Joe Biden asked me to testify on Iraq before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And I even got invited to share my (pessimistic) views with the British foreign ministry, the French foreign ministry, the Japanese Institute of Middle East Economies, etc., etc. Not to mention a lot of correspondence with people in similar institutions in other countries.

What pained me most of all, aside from the sheer scale of destruction in Iraq set off by Bush’s illegal and ill-considered adventurism, was that the Iraq War clearly gave al-Qaeda an opening to grow and expand and recruit. I think if Bush had gone after Bin Laden as single-mindedly as Obama has, he would have gotten him, and could have rolled up al-Qaeda in 2002 or 2003. Instead, Bush’s occupation of a major Arab Muslim country kept a hornet’s nest buzzing against the US, Britain and other allies.

Now that Obama has eliminated the monster Usama Bin Laden and vindicated the capability of the United States to visit retribution on its dire enemies, he can do one other great good for this country abroad. He can get us out of Iraq altogether. The US military presence there is the fruit of a poisonous tree. It will always provoke Iraqi Muslim activists, whether Sunni or Shiite or secular nationalist. And it angers the whole Arab world.

The Arab Spring has demonstrated that the Arab masses yearn for liberty, not thuggish repression, for life, not death and destruction, for parliamentary democracy, not theocratic dictatorship. Bin Laden was already a dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War and the age of dictators in which a dissident such as he had no place in society and was shunted off to distant, frontier killing fields. The new generation of young Arabs in Egypt and Tunisia has a shot at a decent life. Obama has put the US on the right side of history in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya (where I see crowds for the first time in my life waving American flags). People might want a little help from a distance, but they don’t want to see Western troops deployed in fighting units on their soil.

If Obama can get us out of Iraq, and if he can use his good offices to keep the pressure on the Egyptian military to lighten up, and if he can support the likely UN declaration of a Palestinian state in September, the US will be in the most favorable position in the Arab world it has had since 1956. And he would go down in history as one of the great presidents. If he tries to stay in Iraq and he takes a stand against Palestine, he risks provoking further anti-American violence. He can be not just the president who killed Bin Laden, but the president who killed the pretexts for radical violence against the US. He can promote the waving of the American flag in major Arab cities. And that would be a defeat and humiliation for Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda more profound than any they could have dreamed.

Posted in al-Qaeda, Iraq War | 103 Comments

George W. Bush was quietly approaching US petroleum corporations and trying to do deals with the French and Russian governments and their energy companies regarding Iraqi petroleum fields in fall of 2002, according to British government documents. BP learned of these secret negotiations, and arranged for Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Trade Minister, Lady Elizabeth Symons, to lobby Bush on behalf of BP, which was afraid of being “locked out” of the Iraqi fields after the war.

The anxieties were palpable in a memo written by Edward Chaplin, director of the Middle East department at the Foreign Office, in October of 2002, after a meeting with the companies: “Shell and BP could not afford not to have a stake in [Iraq] for the sake of their long-term future… We were determined to get a fair slice of the action for UK companies in a post-Saddam Iraq.”

After a meeting with BP executives at the Foreign Office on 6 November 2002 to discuss the situation in post-war Iraq, an FO official wrote, “Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity.”

Symons tried to reassure BP that she believed it would be given Iraq concessions as a reward for Britain joining in the Iraq War, which proves that Blair was already committed to the war, despite his denials at that time. She pledged to “report back to the companies before Christmas” on the lobbying.

The British daily, The Independent, has been given 1,000 documents detailing talks between the British government and oil companies such as BP and Shell in fall of 2002 about their share in Iraqi petroleum. The memoranda were gained through Freedom of Information requests over five years by the activist Greg Muttitt, who has a book forthcoming. The documents flatly contradict denials 1) by Shell that its representatives met with the Blair government on Iraq at that time; 2) by BP that it had “no strategic interest” in Iraqi petroleum, and 3) by Tony Blair himself that it was a “conspiracy theory” that he was interested in Iraq’s petroleum as a motive for war.

In every decade since the 1950s, fewer and fewer big new petroleum fields have been discovered. Companies such as BP and Exxon-Mobil are desperate for new fields to exploit and fearful for the future if global oil production has peaked or is about to do so. Iran and Iraq hold most of the likely big reserves of unexploited oil known or suspected to exist in relatively easy-to-get-at regions.

It seems an odd accusation that the Bush White House was reaching out to Jacques Chirac and Total SA, and to Vladimir Putin and Gazprom Lukoil in fall of 2002 but cutting the British out.

Since we know from Symons that Blair was already committed to the Iraq War in fall of 2002, the most likely conclusion is that the Bush team was taking the British for granted and felt it more urgent to dangle the Iraqi oil fields before Chirac and Putin as an enticement to them to support a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing the war. In this scenario, BP was being a little paranoid about being cut out of these deals; they just were not at that time a front-burner negotiating partner because London was felt already to be on board. But they appear to have feared that Bush would give the show away to France and Russia to get them on board, leaving slim pickings for BP.

In the end, of course, Chirac and Putin declined to be bribed by Bush in that way, leaving Washington with only Britain as an invasion partner, which did in fact set BP up to do very handsomely in nailing down Iraq petroleum concessions.

As soon as Iraq had been occupied, in spring, 2003, British officials began strategizing how to insert corporations such as BP into an “open” Iraqi oil market without appearing “gratuitously exploitative,” according to The Independent today. I suppose being exploitative was O.K., just as long as the UK was not being unnecessarily so.

After 2003, half of Iraq’s estimated 115 billion barrels in reserves have been optioned by major Western petroleum corporations through the Iraqi ministry of petroleum, headed by Hussein Shahristani, a Shiite member of the State of Law coalition of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who, as an exiled activist of the Da`wa or Islamic Mission Party, had signed on to the Pentagon plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2002.

Blair said in February of 2003 on the eve of war,

“Let me just deal with the oil thing because… the oil conspiracy theory is honestly one of the most absurd when you analyse it. The fact is that, if the oil that Iraq has were our concern, I mean we could probably cut a deal with Saddam tomorrow in relation to the oil. It’s not the oil that is the issue, it is the weapons…”

I explained in my book, Engaging the Muslim World,

why Blair’s assertion was untrue. The prime minister could not have done a deal with Saddam Hussein, because of US congressional sanctions on that country. Those sanctions, like the ones on Iran, were strongly backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC, among the most effective and powerful lobbies on Capitol Hill. They were intended to ensure that Iraq and Iran, oil states hostile to Israel with the wherewithal to build big armies and to acquire deadly weaponry, should remain weak and unable to benefit from their petroleum riches.

I pointed out that Dick Cheney, while heading up Halliburton in 1995-2000, had heavily lobbied Congress to stop imposing such sanctions, and had tried to convince it to restore good relations with Iran, so that US energy corporations could invest in its petroleum and gas. Cheney’s anti-sanctions efforts on the Hill crashed and burned, and he was unable to make any headway against AIPAC on that issue.

I argued that Cheney concluded that if you can’t beat them, you have to join them. He appears to have decided that there was only one way to open up Iraq and Iran to Western investment, which was to do regime change and install governments in Baghdad and Tehran that would be pro-American and at least not openly hostile or threatening to Israel. In this way, the anxieties of AIPAC could be allayed at the same time that the ambitions of Big Oil could be achieved. This old-time Arabist thus made an alliance with the Neoconservatives, who had in 1996 argued for regime change in Iraq, in a white paper for Israeli prime ministerial candidate Binyamin Netanyahu.

So what Blair was saying was wrong on two counts. First, it simply was not the case that Washington and London were free to do a deal with Saddam. The US congress’s AIPAC-backed sanctions regime, which would have been applied to BP if it had tried to go into Saddam’s Iraq, stood in the way of any such move. And second, that Blair had joined with Bush in an illegal war of aggression with no UNSC sanction and no justification under the United Nations Charter, because of the prospect of opening Iraqi fields to development by BP and Shell, was not “absurd.”

Blair has made on the order of $32 million since leaving office, through various consultancies. In 2007 he took BP executives with him to Libya where he arranged for an entree for it into that market, potentially worth $21 billion. That is why the current UN intervention in Libya is not a war for oil. They had the oil. Blair also promised military training to Qaddafi’s special forces.

Lady Symons was until last month an unpaid adviser to Libya’s National Economic Development Board; she quit when Qaddafi began sending tanks to shell urban rallies.

The documentation of BP’s negotiations with the Blair government on Iraqi petroleum suggests that researchers should look further into the role in the Iraq War of Big Oil in the United States. Though, since the US is now more of a plutocracy than Britain and US citizens now have fewer rights than UK citizens, we will not find it as easy to get to the bottom of it all.

Posted in Energy, Environment, Iraq, Iraq War | 27 Comments