Posts by BarryLando:
Shinseki– Did we fall for the Myth?
June 1st, 2014
By Barry Lando.
“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.
Donald Rumsfeld, February 2002
I concluded my last blog about the resignation of General Eric Shinseki as head of the Department of Veterans Affairs with this rather dramatic statement:
“But now, the sorry circle is complete: the officer who cautioned about the true costs of attacking Iraq and was eviscerated as a result, has been felled by the consequences of the very invasion he warned against.
“That, you could definitely say, is a known known.”
Maybe not. I’ve now been told that my conclusion, though pithy, may have been wrong—an example of the myth making generated by both sides of the Iraq debate.
(It’s also an instructive look of the frustrations of journalism: endlessly peeling away the layers of an onion; never 100% certain you’ve arrived at the truth. In the case of General Eric Shinseki, I’m still peeling.)
Shinseki, as I wrote, is viewed by liberals as something of a martyr–having had the guts to tell truth to power during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
In February 2003, he testified before a senate committee that the occupation of Iraq could take hundreds of thousands of American troops, not the tens of thousands, that the neo-cons pushing for war were claiming. In the end, of course, the general’s guestimate proved far closer to the truth than those of the Pentagon spokesmen who dismissed Shinseki’s views as rubbish.
But for challenging Rumsfeld, the story grew, Shinseki became an outcast, an object lesson to military commanders about what happens to those who took on Rumsfeld and his cronies over Iraq.
Indeed, when Barrack Obama nominated Shinseki to be secretary of Veterans Affairs in December 2008, it was seen by many as a rehabilitation of the general, a poke in the eye of Rumsfeld.
But, according to Jamie McIntyre, who covered the Pentagon for 16 years for CNN, the Shinseki myth is just that—myth…
“Shinseki the “truth to power” teller? just ain’t so.In my opinion,” McIntyre wrote me in an email.
“The main thing is: Shinseki had ample opportunity to voice his concerns. In fact, as a member of the Joint Chiefs, he had a DUTY to voice them.
“Once the plans [for the invasion of Iraq] were in place, Gen Richard Myers the Chairman at the time — polled all the chiefs and asked each one if they had ANY reservations about the war planning to speak up. He asked Shinseki DIRECTLY (I was told this by Myers and Gen Pace the Vice Chief) and Shinseki said nothing.”
“Shinseki NEVER — And I repeat NEVER — voiced a single concern to ANYONE in the administration or the military.
“His one and only comment was the one forced out of him by Sen. Levin, in that Feb 2003 hearing. And Shinseki steadfastly refused then — or forever afterward — to clarify what he meant — until his exit memo to Rumsfeld.In the June 2003 memo, Shinseki admitted he didn’t think there was a “right” answer to a question that would depend largely on what the commander on the ground’s analysis. He said he only offered an open-ended nonspecific larger number to allow for maximum flexibility.
“So, people read into it what they wanted.
“This whole mythology that has grown up around Shinseki is maddening because it’s just not true.”
According to McIntyre, “Shinseki¹s clash with Rumsfeld was more about Shinseki¹s insular taciturn style, than any dispute about the size of the force.
“He spent four years working on something called the FCS Future Combat system,) which was supposed to be a family of high-tech fighting vehicles, all connected by wi-fi, but the program, ‘Shinseki¹ssignature achievement’, was cancelled years after he left, with a price tag of $20 Billion.
“As a side note, what really rankled Rumsfeld was all the effort Shinseki put into changing the army¹s hat into a beret…Shinseki’s crusade for the beret was seen as wrong-headed² and widely mocked inside the army. Pictures circulated with Shinseki sporting Mickey Mouse ears. He was becoming a joke. That¹s why Rumsfeld was annoyed and frustrated with him. He seemed clueless–focused on all the wrong things. Rumsfeld was also enraged over the Army¹s decision to go behind his back and lobby for a weapons program he canceled.
The fact that Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz never attended Shinseki’s retirement ceremony in June 2003 was widely interpreted as their final snub of the general. But, according to McIntyre, the two officials never showed up because Shinseki never invited them. “when Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz asked to come speak at his retirement, they were refused twice.”
Why didn’t Shinseki invite them? One might speculate that Shinseki never forgave them for their sharp reaction to his congressional testimony or the humiliation he suffered when the Pentagon leaked the name of his replacement fifteen months before his retirement, turning him into a lame duck.
Yet, as McIntyre writes, those ignoring the background to Rumsfeld’s and Wolfowitz’s absence were left to draw their own conclusions.
“And in characteristic style Shinseki let that misimpression stand, never publically correcting the record, just as he never publically corrected the record about what he really meant in his February 2003 Senate testimony.”
“It is shameful that he never spoke up to tell what really happened. He just retired and never spoke to anyone. And let the lie grow,
“I saw many acts of moral courage in my 16 years covering the Pentagon.
“Shinseki was not one who demonstrated that quality.”
I am sure there are many who would take issue with McIntyre’s vitriolic critique of General Shinseki. On the other hand, the fact that the general was apparently caught unawares by a devastating crisis at the V.A., a crisis that critics had been screaming about for years, may prove McIntyre’s point.
If true, it’s also of course, a sorry reflection on an Obama administration that first appointed Shinseki to the key post and kept him there for six years.
By the way, as Jamie McIntyre also points out, the question of “known knowns,” intrigued not just Donald Rumsfeld:
“Mark Twain is reputed to have said, (but nobody knows if he actually did) :“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Barry Lando is author of a novel, “the Watchman’s File,” available on Amazon. He is currently working on a sequel, “Unknown Unknowns”, about a TV reporter’s investigation of his own fatally flawed report on Iraq.
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Saudis backing Israel’s Mossad, confirmed?
March 8th, 2014By Barry Lando.
On October 12, 2012, Ispeculated there was a strong likelihood that Saudi Arabia was bankrolling Israel’s Mossad. Those funds paid for, among other things, theassassinations of several of Iran’s top nuclear experts over the past couple of years. That cooperation was, I wrote, the latest bizarre development in a clandestine alliance between the Zionist State of Israel and Saudi Arabia, guardian of Islam’s most holy site. The Huffington Post refused to run that blog because I only had one source, who I was not allowed to name. Instead, I posted it on my own and other sites.
That blog went viral, particularly in Israel, Iran and Saudi Arabia, where it was picked up by several news agencies. Now, that claim has received new backing from a reputable Israeli source. But before getting to that, here is my original blog.
““A friend, with good sources in the Israeli government, claims that the head of Israel’s Mossad has made several trips to deal with his counterparts in Saudi Arabia—one of the results: an agreement that the Saudis would bankroll the series of assassinations of several of Iran’s top nuclear experts that have occurred over the past couple of years. The amount involved, my friend claims, was $1 billion dollars. A sum, he says, the Saudis considered cheap for the damage done to Iran’s nuclear program.
“At first blush, the tale sounds preposterous. On the other hand. it makes eminent sense. The murky swamp of Middle East politics has nothing to do with the easy slogans and 30 second sound bites of presidential debates.
“After all, nowhere more than in the Middle East does the maxim hold true: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And both Israel and the Saudis have always detested Iran’s Shiite fundamentalist leaders. The feeling is mutual. Tehran has long been accused of stirring up trouble among Saudi’s restless Shiites.
Israeli and Saudi leaders particularly fear Iran’s attempts to develop nuclear weapons. Thus, it would only be natural that (along with the U.S.) they would back a coordinated program to at least slow up, if not permanently cripple, Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
“It also makes perfect sense, that, in retaliation for the cyber attacks on their centrifuges, the Iranians reportedly launched their own cyber attack on a Saudi state-owned target: Saudi Aramco, the world’s most valuable company.
Last August 15th, [2012] someone with privileged access to Aramco’s computers was able to unleash a virus that wreaked havoc with the company’s systems. U.S. intelligence experts point their finger at Tehran”.
“Indeed, a report earlier this year by Tel Aviv University cites Saudi Arabia as the last hope and defense line for Israel. With most of Israel’s traditional allies in the region sent packing or undermined by the Arab Spring, the Saudis are the Jewish State’s last chance to protect its political interests in the Arab world.”
——-
Now comes further confirmation of that strange alliance from Richard Silverstein’s excellent blog Tikun Olam. Silverstein gets many of his scoops from Israeli reporters, often confiding information they’re not allowed to report in Israel. Silverstein also closely monitors the Israeli media.
He has been following the close cooperation between Israel and Saudi Arabia in targeting Syria and Iran. In his latest log he reports, “ShalomYerushalmi, writing in Maariv, dropped an even more amazing bombshell.
Saudi Arabia isn’t just coordinating its own intelligence efforts with Israel. It’s actually financing a good deal of Israel’s very expensive campaign against Iran. As you know, this has involved massive sabotage against IRG missile bases, the assassination of five nuclear scientists, the creation of a series of computer cyber weapons like Stuxnet and Flame. It may also conceivably involve an entire class of electronic and conventional weapons that could be used in a full-scale attack on Iran. Who knows, this might even include the sorts of bunker buster bombs only the U.S. currently has access to, which could penetrate the Fordo facility. It might include scores more super-tankers which could provide the fuel necessary for Israeli planes to make it to Iran and return. All of this is expensive. Very expensive.
As background to his story, Yerushalmi, cited a recent speech by Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Nethanyahu, referring to the possibility that Arab states, which privately maintain better relations with Israel today than does the European union, would do so publicly if peace were to break out.
“Nethanyahu,” wrote the Israeli reporter, “referred almost certainly to Saudi Arabia which finances the expenses of the enormous campaign which we are conducting against Iran.”
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“The question” Silverstein writes in his blog, “is how far is Saudi Arabia willing to go. If Bibi ever decided to launch an attack, would the Sunni nation fund that as well? The answer seems clearly to be yes.
“The next question is, given there is airtight military censorship in Israel, why did the censor allow Maariv to publish this? Either someone was asleep at the switch or the IDF and Israel’s political and intelligence officials want the world to know of the Saudi-Israeli effort. Who specifically do they want to know? Obama, of course. In the event the nuclear talks go south, Bibi wants Obama to know there’s a new Sugar Daddy in town. No longer will Israel have only the U.S. to rely on if it decides to go to war. Saudi Arabia will be standing right behind….
“I don’t think this news substantially alters the military calculus. Israel, even with unlimited funding, still can’t muster the weapons and armaments it would need to do the job properly. That will take time. But Israel isn’t going to war tomorrow. This news reported in Maariv is presumably Bibi playing one card from his hand. It’s an attempt to warn the president that the U.S. is no longer the only game in town. Personally, it’s the sort of huffing and puffing that I can’t imagine plays well in Washington. But it’s the way Bibi plays the game.”
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America and Iraq: A black hole of history
January 12th, 2014By Barry Lando.
The last thing the U.S. should do is become militarily embroiled in the conflict raging again in Iraq. But for Americans to shake their heads in lofty disdain and turn away, as if they have no responsibility for the continued bloodletting, is outrageous. Why? Because America bears a large part of the blame for turning Iraq into the basket case it’s become.
The great majority of Americans don’t realize that fact. They never did. So much of what the U.S. did to Iraq has been consigned by America to a black hole of history. Iraqis, however, can never forget.
In 1990, for instance, during the first Gulf War, George H.W. Bush, called on the people of Iraq to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein. But when they finally did, after Saddam’s forces were driven from Kuwait, President Bush refused any gesture of support, even permitted Saddam’s pilots to keep flying their deadly helicopter gunships. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were slaughtered.
[H.W. Bush later denied any responsibility for that uprising, but you can hear his appeal to the Iraqis in a documentary I produced with Michel Despratx, “The Trial of Saddam Hussein.”]
Even more devastating to Iraq was the Draconian embargo that the United States and its allies pushed through the U.N. Security Council in August 1990, after Saddam invaded Kuwait.
The embargo cut off all trade between Iraq and the rest of the world. That meant everything, from food and electric generators to vaccines, hospital equipment—even medical journals. Since Iraq imported 70 percent of its food, and its principal revenues were derived from the export of petroleum, the sanctions dealt a catastrophic blow, particularly to the young.
Enforced primarily by the United States and Britain, the sanctions remained in place for almost 13 years and were, in their own way, a weapon of mass destruction far more deadly than anything Saddam had developed. Two U.N. administrators who oversaw humanitarian relief in Iraq during that period, and resigned in protest, considered the embargo to have been a “crime against humanity.”
Early on, it became evident that for the United States and England, the real purpose of the sanctions was not the elimination of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, but of Saddam Hussein himself, though that goal went far beyond anything authorized by the Security Council.
The effect of the sanctions was magnified by the wide-scale destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure —power plants, sewage treatment facilities, telephone exchanges, irrigation systems—wrought by the American air and rocket attacks preceding the first Gulf War. That infrastructure has still to be completely rebuilt.
Iraq’s contaminated waters became a biological killer as lethal as anything Saddam had attempted to produce. There were massive outbreaks of severe child and infant dysentery. Typhoid and cholera, which had been virtually eradicated in Iraq, also packed the hospital wards.
Added to that was a disastrous shortage of food, which meant malnutrition for some, starvation and death for others. At the same time, the medical system, once the country’s pride, careened toward total collapse. Iraq would soon have the worst child mortality rate of all 188 countries measured by UNICEF.
There is no question that U.S. planners knew how awful the force of the sanctions would be. In fact, the health calamity was coolly predicted and then meticulously tracked by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. Its first study was entitled “Iraq’s Water Treatment Vulnerabilities.”
Indeed, from the beginning, the intent of U.S. officials was to create such a catastrophic situation that the people of Iraq—civilians, but particularly the military—would be forced to react. As Denis Halliday, the former U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, put it to me, “the U.S. theory behind the sanctions was that if you hurt the people of Iraq and kill the children particularly, they’ll rise up with anger and overthrow Saddam.”
But rather than weakening Saddam, the sanctions only consolidated his hold on power. “The people didn’t hold Saddam responsible for their plight,” Halliday said. “They blamed the U.S. and the U.N. for these sanctions and the pain and anger that these sanctions brought to their lives.”
Even after the sanctions were modified in the “Oil for Food Program” in 1996, the resources freed up were never enough to cover Iraq’s basic needs. Hans von Sponeck, who also resigned his post as U.N. coordinator in Iraq, condemned the program as “a fig leaf for the international community.”
By1999 a UNICEF study concluded that half a million Iraqi children perished in the previous eight years because of the sanctions—and that was four years before they ended. Another American expert in 2003 estimated that the sanctions killed between 343,900 and 529,000 young children and infants–certainly more young people than were ever killed by Saddam Hussein.
Beyond the deaths and wholesale destruction, the sanctions had another equally devastating but less visible impact, as documented early on by a group of Harvard medical researchers. They reported that four out of five children interviewed were fearful of losing their families; two-thirds doubted whether they themselves would survive to adulthood. They were “the most traumatized children of war ever described.”
The experts concluded that “a majority of Iraq’s children would suffer from severe psychological problems throughout their lives.”
Much more chilling, is the fact that the Harvard study was done in 1991, after the sanctions had been in effect for only seven months. They would continue for another 12 years, until May 22, 2003, after the U.S.-led invasion.
By then, an entire generation of Iraqis had been ravaged. But rather than bringing that nightmare to an end, the invasion unleashed another series of horrors. Estimates of Iraqis who died over the following years, directly or indirectly due to the savage violence, range up to 400,000. Millions more became refugees.
But there was more. The military onslaught and the American rule that immediately followed, destroyed not just the people and infrastructure of Iraq, but the very fiber of the nation. Though Saddam’s tyranny was ruthless, over the years the country’s disparate peoples had begun living together as Iraqis, in the same towns and neighborhoods, attending the same schools, intermarrying—slowly developing a sense of nationhood.
That process was shattered by the American proconsuls who took charge after the invasion. They oversaw a massive political purge, a witch hunt, that led to the gutting of key ministries, the collapse of the police and military and other key government institutions, without creating any viable new structures in their place. The Shiites who the U.S. helped bring to power took revenge on the Sunnis, many of whom had backed Saddam.
The result was catastrophic. Frightened Iraqis turned for security to their own tribal or sectarian leaders. Local militias flourished. The violence spiraled out of control. Thousands perished in a horrific surge of ethnic cleansing.
Through bribery and political arm twisting, the U.S. was able to tamp down the conflagration it had helped ignite. Underneath, however, the distrust and hatred continued smoldering.
And then, in 2011, the U.S. troops pulled out. President Maliki continued pouring oil on the fire, refusing to give Sunnis and Kurds a share of power. And now, fed by the conflict in neighboring Syria, Iraq is once again caught up in bloody turmoil.
And who is having to deal with all this? The generation of Iraqis that the Harvard researchers had long labeled “the most traumatized children of war ever described.” The majority of whom “would suffer from severe psychological problems throughout their lives.”
It is they now, who have come of age. It is they who, if they have not fled the country, are the military and police commanders, the businessmen and bureaucrats and newspaper editors, the tribal chiefs and sectarian leaders, the imans and jihadis and suicide bombers–all of them now still caught up in the ever-ending calamity of Iraq.
That, America, is the legacy you helped create in Iraq. How do you deal with it now?
God only knows.
America’s obscenities
December 19th, 2013By Barry Lando.
At times, outrageous juxtapositions in the news shriek for attention. Sometimes, they’re actually obscene.
On one hand, for instance, a series in the New York Times last week about the plight of 22,000 homeless children in New York City– “the highest number since the Great Depression in the most unequal metropolis in America.”
On the other hand, was a scattering of reports, all facets of another on-going outrage: The hundreds of billions of dollars that the U.S. continues to pour into the cesspools of Central Asia, in a still undefined and ultimately futile effort to control political events thousands of miles away.
We begin with the startling five-part series about the plight of the huge “invisible tribe” of homeless children and their families in New York City, written by Times reporter Andrea Elliott. She eschewed mind-numbing statistics and faceless generalizations to zero in on the day-by-day plight of one 12 year-old girl, named Dasani.
“She [Dasani] wakes to the sound of breathing. The smaller children lie tangled beside her, their chests rising and falling under winter coats and wool blankets. A few feet away, their mother and father sleep near the mop bucket they use as a toilet. Two other children share a mattress by the rotting wall where the mice live, opposite the baby, whose crib is warmed by a hair dryer perched on a milk crate.”
Dasani lived for three years in a teeming, squalid homeless shelter, the Auburn Family Residence in Brooklyn. She shared a cramped, dank room with seven siblings and her parents, both of whom battled—not always successfully- with drug addiction.
Adding to the horror, the Auburn Residence, which holds 280 children and their families, is located in Forest Greene, one of the new gentrified glories of a supposedly transformed Brooklyn. The problem is that, despite New York’s spectacular resurgence over the past few years, the numbers of poor have also risen. Thousands, like Dasani and her family, have been consigned to “shelters” like the Auburn.
“It is a place where mold creeps up walls and roaches swarm, where feces and vomit plug communal toilets, where sexual predators have roamed and small children stand guard for their single mothers outside filthy showers….”
Almost half of New Yorkers live near or below the poverty line. “Their traditional anchors — affordable housing and jobs that pay a living wage — have weakened as the city reorders itself around the whims of the wealthy.”
—-
But there were reports about another scandal last week, the continuing drip-drip of exposes that have been going on for so long that most of us are inured to them. Our eyes glaze over. And yet, it continues: the hemorrhaging of hundreds of billions of American dollars, part of a War on Terror that no one has ever clearly explained—nor convincingly justified.
One shocking case involves almost half a billion U.S. government dollars flushed down the drain in Afghanistan. Four hundred and eighty-six million dollars, to be precise. That’s the amount the U.S. spent to provide twenty G-222 turboprop transport planes to the Afghan Airforce. The planes are currently gathering dust on the tarmacs in Kabul and Frankfurt. Most never flew for more than a few hundred hours.
The problem? For one thing, the company running the program –Rome -based Finmessanica Alenia Aermachi –never bought enough spare parts to keep the planes running. To do that, another $200 million would be needed. Another problem: Some of those parts are no longer available. Indeed, six of the original planes have already been cannibalized for spares.
The upshot: even before entering fully into service, those $486 million dollars worth of planes are to be junked.
—-
Back to New York: According to the Times, the causes of the disturbing phenomenon of huge numbers of homeless children are far from simple. They range from the recent economic crisis to wage stagnation to the rising costs of housing. They are also a direct result of Draconian cutbacks on government spending, on all levels, particularly for programs intended to help the poor: rent subsidies, special education, child care, health etc. etc. etc.
Americans, after all, have to tighten their belts, make sacrifices, get their financial house in order.
A few blocks from Dasanis’s shelter the more affluent kids have tutors to help boost their SAT’s and attend a private school where tuition is $35,000 a year.
Dasani, however, attends a nearby public school in Fort Greene.
The Susan S. McKinney Secondary School of the Arts has suffered its own troubles under the Bloomberg administration: a shrinking budget and fewer teachers….
[Her teacher] Miss Hester knows that students learn when they get excited. It bothers her that McKinney lacks the sophisticated equipment of other public schools. She shelled out more than $1,000 of her own money, as a single mother, to give her classroom a projector and document camera.
—-
In far off Kabul, it seems that the major problem with the half a billion dollars worth of planes that are to be junked is the fact that, as Lt. General Charles Davis, the top acquisition officer in the U.S. Airforce admitted, the planes themselves just weren’t up to the wear and tear, the heat and the dust, of the Afghan environment.
“Just about everything you can think of was wrong for it other than the airplane was built for the size of cargo and mission they needed,” Davis said in an interview. “Other than that, it didn’t really meet any of the requirements.”
John Sopko the special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, who wrote a blistering report on the planes, told Fox News, “We need to know who made the decision to purchase these planes and why?” “We intend to get to the bottom of this and hold people accountable.”
Sopko has his hands full. With the U.S. pouring some two billion dollars a week into Afghanistan over the past few years, such scandals have been a dime a dozen.
For instance, Washington Post reports that the U.S. has so far spent $107 million dollars to build a massive five story Defense Ministry headquarters“which will include state-of-the-art bunkers and the second-largest auditorium in Kabul.”
That $107 million is double the original estimate, but the mammoth hulk is still not completed. The U.S. government has—temporarily–run out of money for the project.
“Nobody was watching it like they should, and it’s just been an open checkbook,” said an American official involved in the management of the project.” “We failed, big time.”
That Pentagon in Kabul is only part of a huge $9.3 billion construction spree –most of it financed by the U.S. government— aimed at providing hundreds of bases, outposts and hospitals for the Afghan military.
—-
Back to the Times:
“One in five American children is now living in poverty, giving the United States the highest child poverty rate of any developed nation except for Romania.”
And at the Auburn shelter in Brooklyn.
City and state inspectors have repeatedly cited the shelter for deplorable conditions, including sexual misconduct by staff members, spoiled food, asbestos exposure, lead paint and vermin. Auburn has no certificate of occupancy, as required by law, and lacks an operational plan that meets state regulations. Most of the shelter’s smoke detectors and alarms have been found to be inoperable…
Responses by the city’s Department of Homeless Services attribute Auburn’s violations to a lack of money. To the state’s complaint, in 2003, that only one staff member is tending to 177 school-age children in the shelter’s recreation room, the agency responds: “We lack resources for teenagers!”
The Times Public Editor commented on the homeless series. One of her concerns was that some readers might take issue with the language used by Dasani’s mother: the “vulgarities in the passage…the use of the F word twice in Thursday’s installment.”
The editor wanted to reassure Times’ readers. “Our basic guidelines about avoiding vulgarities and obscenities haven’t changed, but we all recognize that there are cases where an exception is justified.”
—-
Members of congress were more tasteful in their choice of epithets during a hearing this past week. Experts from the State Department and the Pentagon were testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the administration’s plans for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.
The problem arose when Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, asked what he thought was a fairly simple question.
“How much are we spending annually in Afghanistan? How much is the cost to the American taxpayer?”
According to the news report, he was met with “stone silence” from the government experts. They looked questioningly at each other with empty stares.
“Anybody know?” Mr. Rohrabacker asked. “Nobody knows the total budget, what we’re spending in Afghanistan. It’s a hearing on Afghanistan. Can I have an estimate?
“I’m sorry, congressman,” one of the experts said.
Mr. Rohrabacker called the lack of an answer “disheartening.” [ The correct answer is almost $93 billion]
“How many killed and wounded have we suffered in the last 12 months,” he asked.
Again, none of the three had an answer. One said he would check and get back.[ The answer is 118]
“We’re supposed to believe you fellows have a plan that is going to end up in a positive way in Afghanistan,” the congressman said. “Holy cow.”
—-
Meanwhile, responding to the Times series on the “Invisible Child”, New York’s newly appointed deputy mayor for health and human services, said the in-coming administration would restore rental subsidies in some form to help reduce the level of the homeless.
“That’s a good start,” the Times editorialized” but more is needed, including from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who can aid that effort by ponying up money for the subsidy program as well as for services that save poor people from eviction.”
The Times announced that, with donations pouring in from readers moved by the series on the “Invisible Child, the newspaper has set up a trust to administer those funds on behalf of the children.
—-
And in Kabul, as they wait for an expected $24 million to complete the new military headquarters, American officials have dispatched a skeleton crew to install windows to protect the building from the harsh Kabul winter.
“We have gotten ourselves into a position that we need to get out of, and we definitely need to fix it,” said Brig. Gen. Michael E. Wehr, the deputy chief of staff engineers for the U.S.-led coalition. “It’s an important building. It’s a Ministry of Defense headquarters. It’s in Kabul. We’ve got to get this done right
60 Minutes Benghazi Disaster: There Could Have Been So Many More
November 17th, 2013By Barry Lando.
The embarrassing flap resulting from the 60 Minutes report on Benghazi–broadcasting a sensational interview with security officer, Dylan Davies, an apparently totally trustworthy, convincing source, who later turned out to be a con artist–makes me shudder.
I recall the number of times during my thirty years as a producer with 60 Minutes when I only narrowly missed being caught in the same kind of devastating, career-shattering trap.
But first, what does it mean to be a producer at 60 Minutes? Each report on the show has “produced by” written on the art work introducing it, but most viewers have no clue what “produced by” really entails.
Indeed, the great irony of 60 Minutes is a question of truth in packaging. That is, 60 Minutes, which prides itself on ruthless truth telling, exposing cant and fraud, is in itself, something of a charade.
The fact is that, although the viewers tune in to watch the on-going exploits of Lara, Morley, Bob, etc. etc., most of the intrepid reporting, writing, and even many of the most probing questions posed in the interviews, are not the handiwork of the stars, but much more the effort of teams of producers. associate producers, and researchers–who actually sift through and report the stories that the stars present–as their own exploits–each Sunday night.
The stars who pull down the seven figure salaries. But, it’s the producers and their assistants who are, far more than the stars, also responsible for checking out the veracity of those reports.
That’s a daunting task. Most investigative reports on 60 Minutes (or anywhere else) are usually told in terms of black and white, the bad guys vs. the good guys. The problem is most of life is played out in shades of grey. When you start digging into any supposed scandal you usually find that the bad guy is not all that bad; the good guy not all that good, and often the supposed villain is not really a villain at all. Or, as the former City Editor of the old Chicago Herald American, Harry Romanoff, famously said, “If you dig deep enough, any story collapses.”
Usually producers and correspondents recognize when they arrive at that point, and drop the project. But not always. Particularly when the devastating revelation occurs after you have already committed several weeks and tens of thousands of dollars to a report. It’s then that blowing the whistle is most painful, and the temptation to continue, in spite of what you have uncovered, the greatest. In addition to that is the constant pressure to be turning out “sensational pieces”; the rivalry, not just with other news shows, but, even more pronounced, among the producers and correspondents of 60 Minutes themselves.
There’s plenty of ammunition for error. Every week, scores of people write and call 60 Minutes about some incredible expose just waiting to be unearthed. They supply reams of documents, which, they claim, prove their cases, and convincing explanations about why such and such newspaper or congressman refused to follow up on their leads and trumpet the shocking truth.
The more questions you ask, the more convoluted their answers become. But you never know when one of them will pan out. So you never stop listening, studying their evidence, hoping that one of them will turn into something electrifying.
Some of them, like Dylan Davies, the focus of 60 Minutes‘ Benghazi report, also have books to peddle.
That’s what happened in 1982. when I was in New York, researching a report about a particularly brutal Communist regime. We heard that a former top official from the secret police of that country, who had defected to the U.S., was writing his memoirs. I immediately contacted him. He showed up the next day in Mike Wallace’s office with page proofs of the book–plus the female CIA agent who had helped debrief him when he first arrived in the States.
The debriefing had obviously gone well. They’d married and she’d help him write his account. (This, don’t forget, was almost thirty years before Homeland!)
That same week a news story broke about two black U.S. Marine sergeants who, the government claimed, had let two Russian girls they were dating, into the U.S. Embassy in Moscow after hours. The government threw the book at both men, claiming they’d compromised Embassy security.
“You know,” the Communist defector in Mike’s office told me, “what happened in Moscow is nothing. In our country, the U.S. Ambassador’s wife was having an affair with the embassy driver.” The driver, like all nationals working for the embassy, was a member of that country’s secret police.
According to the defector, the Ambassador’s wife had actually enabled the chauffeur to plant bugs in the Embassy and the official residence, and had also provided him with a list of local C.I.A. operatives. Driven by an insatiable penchant for pornography, the Communist ruler of that country had ordered his secret police to film the couplings of the driver and wife, for his private amusement.
That, said the defector, was just for starters. When he arrived in the U.S., he immediately told all this to his C.I.A. and FBI debriefers, warning them that the Ambassador now represented a major security threat to the U.S. His wife’s actions left him wide-open to blackmail. Despite that, the Ambassador was reappointed to serve in another key country. He was, in fact, still there.
Forget the story we were working on. This was a hell of a better tale! Here was the U.S. Government throwing the book at two black Marines for their sexual peccadilloes in Moscow. At the same time, the government learns that the wife of the U.S. Ambassador in another country committed high treason, and it does absolutely nothing. Worse. The Ambassador was actually reassigned to another important posting. The Old Boy network in the State Department had obviously swung into action, taking care of their own, burying the charges against the Ambassador in order not to sully his career.
And all of this was recounted by an apparently unimpeachable source. Of course, he could have invented the tale in order to push his book, but he was one of the top Communist officials to have ever defected. And his account was confirmed by one of his C.I.A. debriefers–his current wife. Sure, the tale was salacious. Sure, by broadcasting it we would be destroying the career of a distinguished U.S. diplomat. But it was an important report, that that had to get out.
In fact, we had dined with the Ambassador and his wife just a few months earlier in the country where they were currently stationed. They were both intelligent, charming, highly respected individuals. But who was worried about the careers and ruined lives of the two black Marines in Moscow? Fed by leads by the government prosecutors, the media had been all over that story. The potential damage done by the Ambassador’s wife was far graver. The defector’s tale also bared the hypocrisy of the U.S. Government. The report, of course, would be a first-class journalistic scoop. It had ‘awards’ written all over it.
Which didn’t prevent us from feeling like a couple of sweaty reporters from the National Inquirer when Mike Wallace and I phoned the Ambassador at his Embassy half the world away. Mike told him we’d just spoken with the Communist defector.
“You have?” said the Ambassador.
“Yes, and he told us about your wife and the embassy driver.”
At that point, we were expecting at least an attempt at denial. There was none.
“He told you about it? Said the Ambassador.
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“Well. We have no choice but to go ahead with the report,” said Mike. “Would you be willing to do an interview?”
Obviously taken aback, the Ambassador said he would have to talk to his wife. They would probably have to fly back to the U.S. to tell their children. His tone was forlorn. He seemed to be admitting all.
We called the State Department for comment. “Mike, this is not a solid story,” a top official told us–but refused to give any specifics. He could only divulge that the situation was not what we had been led to believe. We persisted. Didn’t the wife have an affair with the driver? The official insisted he couldn’t go any further. “All I can say is that the story isn’t there. Believe me.”
Despite the apparent sincerity of the denial, there was no way we could accept it at face value, without any substantiation. So, we continued our report, taping interviews in Washington. One. with a key figure on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; the other, with a former National Security Advisor to the President. They had both routinely okayed the Ambassador’s appointment. They were stunned when we told them what we had learned about the Ambassador’s wife. No government agency had briefed them about the defector’s claims. If they had known, they assured us, there was no way the Ambassador would have been reappointed.
We had a dynamite story. I edited it to twenty-five minutes, almost twice as long as the average 60 Minutes report. Because of the sensitive subject, Howard Stringer, then CBS News president, also viewed it. There was nothing but praise for the segment. It would be broadcast the coming Sunday.
But Mike Wallace and myself continued feeling queasy about what we had wrought. I had morbid premonitions of the ambassador and his wife, rather than facing public dishonor, committing suicide before our broadcast.
Once again, we called the top-ranking State Department official who had originally challenged our story. He maintained ever more vehemently that we had it all wrong. But how could we have had it all wrong? The only answer that made sense would be if the Communist defector had not told the U.S. government what he now was telling us.
We put that to the State Department official. He said he would take a look at the notes from the defector’s debriefing. On Saturday, he called back to Mike’s office where we were just putting the finishing touches on the report, which was to be aired the next day. The defector, he claimed, had indeed told U.S. intelligence that the Ambassador’s wife was having an affair with the driver, but he had never alleged that it went beyond a sexual tryst. She had never enabled the chauffeur to plant a bug in the Embassy, nor had she turned over the names of any CIA agents.
And, prior to the Ambassador’s reassignment, he and his wife and top State Department figures had frankly discussed the whole matter, so there would be no threat of blackmail. But the State Department official still refused to let us see the debriefing reports. Impossible. Much too sensitive. We would have to take his word.
What to do? Once again, Mike called the defector at the “safe house” the government had provided him in Virginia. “Are you sure,” Mike asked him, “that you gave the U.S. government the whole story when you came out? Did you tell them about the bugs being planted? The list of CI.A. agents? We’ve spoken with someone who has seen your debriefing. They say flatly that you did not.”
The defector, who up till then had always sounded totally assured, hesitated. “Well..uh…maybe I didn’t tell his debriefers about it when I first came out.”
“When did you tell them?” Mike persisted.
“Well, I’m not exactly sure.”
Mike and I looked at each other. We pulled the report. In hindsight, we might have gone ahead. After all, the story about his wife having had an affair, was apparently true. And, though the State Department knew about it, officials in Washington responsible for okaying his Ambassadorial appointment, were never told. But, that tale paled beside the riveting scandal we had originally set out to reveal.
Our report was never broadcast. But reverberations from the interviews we had done in Washington rippled across the capitol. Monday morning, the Washington Post ran an article about the status of the case against the two black Marines, and then made references to other similar security breaches, including the amorous adventures of the wife of an unnamed American Ambassador. A few years later, at the end of his assignment, the Ambassador resigned from the department.
As for the defector, he never published his book. But for years afterwards, he continued to feed intriguing tales to reporters in the U.S. and Canada, looking for scoops.
Who knows? Some of them might have been true.
Barry Lando has recently written a novel, “The Watchman’s File”, about Israel’s most closely-guarded secret (it’s not the bomb). Available in soft-cover and Kindle version on Amazon.
Secret History of the “Arab Spring”
November 8th, 2013By Barry Lando.
Recruits for Al Qaeda
Since 9/11 the overriding concern of U.S. policy across the Middle East and Central Asia has been to defeat Al Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on that obsession. Yet when the secret history of the current “Arab Spring” is written, we may learn that one of the many unintended consequences of U.S. attempts to keep up with—and influence–the historic events, was to provide a flood of new recruits to radical Islam.
The immediate cause: Saudi intervention in Bahrain.
While America and its allies have launched a military effort to protect the rebels in Libya, America has voiced only muted protests as its major Arab ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, crushes the rebels in Bahrain—with what could be ruinous reverberations for all concerned.
The rebels in Bahrain are predominately Shiites—who have long chafed under minority Sunnite rule. Riding a mounting wave of popular protests, the Shiites seemed to be on the road to forcing the government in Manama to accept at least some of their demands.
With the Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain, U.S. officials have also been concerned about the unrest. But their attempts to encourage the government to meet some basic demands for change failed. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, visiting Manama on 12 March, criticized the regime for its “baby steps” toward reform.
Meanwhile King Abdullah in neighboring Saudi Arabia looked on with horror as the Arab Spring came sweeping towards him. The Saudis (Sunnis) have their own restive Shiite minority. The King was also concerned that a Shiite breakthrough in Bahrain would strengthen Iran’s sway in the region.
Even more alarming for Abdullah–the alacrity with which Obama turned his back on one-time dictator allies. America’s unceremonious dumping of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak was a shocking harbinger. Could Washington’s remaining key Arab ally be next?
Thus, on March 14th the Saudis (along with their Gulf allies ) finally acted–dispatching a thousand troops along with tanks and armored vehicles across the causeway that separates them from Bahrain-to help brutally stifle the revolt.
In the process, the Saudi king reportedly ignored a specific request from Obama to stay out. The Hell with the duplicitous Americans! He’d had enough of following Washington’s lead. The Americans were shocked and humiliated. Relations between the two governments are supposedly at a nadir.
That’s the official version. But when the history of these events is written, I imagine the real facts will tell a more Machiavellian tale: that the U.S. in fact gave a tacit go ahead to the Saudis to act—with disastrous results.
There have been some unconfirmed reports to that effect, and they make sense. There was a trade off: Libya for Bahrain. Without the Saudis, the U.S. could never have convinced the Arab League to ask for the creation of a no-fly zone over Libya. And without that Arab League resolution, the intervention in Libya would never have occurred. The Saudis and their Gulf partners are also taking part to some extent in that intervention, to provide at least a façade of Arab participation.
In return, U.S. officials have been very muted in any criticism of the brutal crack-down in Bahrain—a country much more vital to Saudi interests, than is Libya.
And brutal it has been: Backed up by the Saudis, Bahraini security forces and pro-regime thugs armed with swords and clubs attacked demonstrators throughout the kingdom. Human rights activists have reported that a total of 26 people have been killed, 300 have been imprisoned, and at least 35 people are missing in the three weeks since the crackdown began in earnest.
Yet scarcely a peep out of Washington.
O.K. you say, what’s wrong with the U.S. trading Bahrain for Libya. It’s realpolitik, right out of the Henry Kissinger playbook.
Except that the consequences of that Saudi intervention may prove much more disastrous to Western (and Saudi) interests than any possible positive fall-out from the adventure in Libya.
That according to a study just issued by the International Crisis Group. What has happened, says the report, is that that from those hundreds of thousands of largely peaceful Shiite protestors in Bahrain, who had thought they could achieve change through peaceful protests–as the Americans have been advocating–that many of those thwarted, bloodied protestors may now turn to violence—exactly as Al Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups have been preaching.
As the report puts it, “Manama’s crackdown and Saudi Arabia’s military intervention are dangerous moves that could stamp out hopes for peaceful transition in Bahrain and turn a mass movement for democratic reform into an armed conflict, while regionalizing an internal political struggle. They could also exacerbate sectarian tensions not only in Bahrain or the Gulf but across the region.
“Along with other member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Saudi Arabia purportedly is responding to dual fears: that the takeover would be tantamount to an Iranian one. Both are largely unfounded. It also is concerned protests might inspire similar movements among its own Eastern Province Shiites, oblivious that its involvement is likelier to provoke than deter them.
“Bahrain’s brutal crackdown and Saudi interference fan flames both want to extinguish. The most effective response to the radical regime change threat or greater Iranian influence is not violent suppression of peaceful protests but political reform. Time is running short and trends are in the wrong direction.”
“In short, the intervention likely achieved precisely the opposite of what it intended.”
Over the years, throughout the region, from Egypt to Yemen to Saudi Arabia, such repression and subsequent radicalization has been a vital source of recruits for Al Qaeda.
Yet, on his latest visit to Saudi Arabia, Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense of what is still billed as the most powerful nation on the planet, Robert Gates reportedly didn’t even dare raise the issue of Bahrain issue King Abdullah.
Just imagine having to face the monarch’s wrath!