Pentagon vs. CIA

A little while ago, I was talking to Yezida, and she asked me about this story, which I hadn’t heard about.

The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA’s historic bailiwick, has created an espionage arm and is reinterpreting US law to give Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine operations abroad, according to interviews with participants and documents obtained by the Washington Post.

The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support Branch, arose from Rumsfeld’s written order to end his “near total dependence on CIA” for what is known as human intelligence. Designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary's direct control, the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators, and technical specialists alongside special operations forces.

[⋯]

The Pentagon has a vast bureaucracy devoted to gathering and analyzing intelligence, often in concert with the CIA, and news reports over more than a year have described Rumsfeld's drive for more and better human intelligence.

What’s this about? More intelligence is good, right? Yezida smelled a rat, but couldn’t identify it. But I think I can.

See, I followed the Valerie Plame story pretty closely for a while. In brief: Plame was a CIA spook whose cover was blown by conservative journalist Robert Novak. Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, had very publicly debunked the president’s “sixteen words” claim in the State of the Union that:

the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa

Lefties suggested that the outing of Plame was political retribution against Wilson. The administration made no serious effort to track down the person who leaked Plame’s secret spy identity, which is bad because

1. Plame was working on preventing nuclear proliferation, which is, y’know, kind of important, and leaking her identity not only destroys her effectiveness, it burns all of her contacts
2. A government official who leaks the identity of a “NOC” undercover agent has committed a felony

On the face of it, this is bad enough, but I’ve learned an important rule: with the Bush administration, it always turns out to be even worse than I first think, even after compensating for the fact that it’s even worse than I first think. Following the story, it became apparent that it was the manifestation of a deeper conflict. As Kos summed up:

⋯ the Plame Affair is just a symptom of continuing warfare between the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA.

Neoconservatives, in particular, have accused the Agency of having failed the nation, permitting planning for the attacks of 9-11 to go undetected. They were furious, too, that the CIA’s intelligence didn’t provide strong evidence that Iraq was the imminent threat that the neocons vociferously claimed it was. The dispute between the neocons and the established intelligence community didn’t begin when the World Trade Center towers crashed into lower Manhattan, however. The wrangling dates back to the 1980s when the Committee on the Present Danger was saying the Soviet Union was much more dangerous than the CIA claimed and publishing annual reports to prove it. Reports that turned out to be … exaggerations. Just like their “reports” on Iraq.

Once you start to look for it, the feud between the hawks at the Pentagon and cooler heads at the CIA (and State) becomes apparent. The centerpoint is over the Iraq invasion. Recall that the CIA doubted that Iraq was an imminent threat, while the administration was cooking the books on intelligence to justify the war. Since the CIA turned out to be right and the Pentagon and President turned out to wrong, our President, bad CEO that he is, invited correct-but-disloyal CIA Director Tenet to spend more time with his family while fortifying wrong-but-loyal Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

So I read the news about a growing Pentagon intelligence operation from the standpoint that Bush wants an intelligence group that understands that their job is to justify what he believes and support his conclusions. But remember the rule: With the Bush administration, it always turns out to be even worse than I first think, even after compensating for the fact that it's even worse than I first think.

Sy Hersch is, of course, on the case, and tells us how.

The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’ — it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the CINCs — the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned — not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”

So it’s not just about cooking intelligence, it’s about conducting operations. The President wants a big team of spooks to go around the world doing nasty shit without Congressional oversight. Lovely.

Update

Kurt Eichenwald writing for the New York Times reports that pre-9/11 CIA briefings strongly suggest that the feud between the CIA and Pentagon predated the 9/11 attacks.

Plame again

I thought I was done with my little obsession with l’affaire Plame, in which the White House retaliated against Joseph Wilson for calling bullshit on their claims of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program by blowing the cover of his CIA spook wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, through White House aide Scooter Libby.

The trail went cold when President Bush commuted Libby’s sentence for his participation … and unwillingness to testify about who was involved. It seemed that we would never know exactly how Bush and Cheney were involved, though we have good evidence that Cheney gave the order to Libby. That commutation of the sentence should have been grounds for impeachment — since it was the President using his pardoning power to protect himself — but you know how it goes.

I thought that was that, but now, via DeLong, I learn that Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel just caught Scott McClellan, former White House Press Secretary, revealing something important.

I learned that the President had secretly declassified the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq for the Vice President and Scooter Libby to anonymously disclose to reporters [⋯] I walk onto Air Force One and a reporter had yelled a question to the President trying to ask him a question about this revelation that had come out during the legal proceedings. The revelation was that it was the President who had authorized, or, enable Scooter Libby to go out there and talk about this information. And I told the President that that’s what the reporter was asking. He was saying that you, yourself, was the one that authorized the leaking of this information. And he said ‘yeah, I did.’ And I was kinda taken aback.

I’m kinda taken aback too. This is slippery, since it’s in the context of talking about the leak of the National Intelligence Estimate. But. We know that Libby leaked both the NIE and Plame’s identity to journalist Judy Miller at the same time. It’s not hard to connect the dots and conclude that the President of the United States authorized his lieutenants to blow the cover of an American spy who was working to prevent nuclear proliferation.

Scandal guide

I'm hoping to find time to blog about the recent doings in the developing Rove / Plame / Wilson / Fitzgerald story. In the meantime, a few resources to help folks make sense of the recent news.

Digby clearly lays out the Plame story as of July and dKosopedia has a very thorough entry for “Valerie Plame affair”.

A while ago, I wrote a post about how this reflects the ongoing feud of the CIA and State Department versus Rumsfeld's Pentagon. It’s a long post, but it’s the one piece of topical news analysis I’ve done on this blog that I’m truly proud of, so please do check it out if you don’t remember it.

Plame

Via Content Love Knowles, a spook’s comments about the outing of Valerie Plame.

the real issues before this Congress and this country today is not partisan politics, not even the loss of secrets. The secrets of Valerie Plame’s cover are long gone. What has suffered perhaps irreversible damage is the credibility of our case officers when they try to convince our overseas contact that their safety is of primary importance to us. How are our case officers supposed to build and maintain that confidence when their own government cannot even guarantee the personal protection of the home team? While the loss of secrets in the world of espionage may be damaging, the stealing of the credibility of our CIA officers is unforgivable ….

And so we are left with only one fundamental truth, the U.S. government exposed the identity of a covert operative. I am not convinced that the toothpaste can be put back into the tube. Great damage has been done and that damage has been increasing every single day for more than two years.

It is a strange turn when The Nation is quoting spooks about threats to national security.

More scooter

Jeff Lomonaco on DeLong’s blog explains everything:

Libby was convicted on four counts of obstruction of justice, perjury and false statements in connection with the account he gave to investigators of how he learned the identify of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson and whether and how he disclosed that information to the press.

[⋯]

Cheney’s hand-written notes on Wilson’s op-ed from two days earlier showed that he was focused on Wilson’s wife’s alleged role in her husband’s mission. Libby was acting at Cheney's direction. How likely is it that Cheney did not direct Libby to disclose information about Plame to Miller?

And what was the substance of Cheney and Bush's discussion shortly before Libby went on his secret mission to disclose previously-classified information to the press with the President's permission?

[⋯]

It is precisely out of the desire to avoid such uncomfortable questions for himself and his vice president that President Bush is likely not to pardon Libby but to commute his sentence, or otherwise keep him out of prison without fully clearing him. That would enable Libby to remain free while he seeks legal vindication through the appeals process. But more importantly, it would enable Bush and Cheney to continue the strategy they have successfully pursued in deterring journalists seeking their explanations with claims that they shouldn't comment on an ongoing legal proceeding.

Greenwald opens up a can on the lawless Washington establishment:

We have a radical and lawless government that has run rampant over the last six years precisely because the institutions designed to stop that abuse have not only stood idly by, but have actively defended and participated in it. We actually have a press corps that holds, as its central belief, that our highest government officials should be free of investigation and accountability. In every country ruled by a lawless government and a corrupt political and media elite, powerful political officials do not go to prison for crimes. That is why convicted felon Lewis Libby will remain free.

Digby comments on pundits defending Libby and offers an aside about Karl Rove.

And Hilzoy also observes:

These quotes have been brought to you by my thinking that it would not be a good idea for me to express my anger directly just now.

Yeah.

Scandal

It looks everyone else is safe, at least for now, but we have indictment on five counts for Libby. From the Washington Post:

The vice president’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby Jr., was charged Friday with obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements in the CIA leak investigation, a politically charged case that will throw a spotlight on President Bush’s push to war. Libby resigned and left the White House.

This is only the first round. Investigations are ongoing. The Post explains why this matters.

Any trial would dig into the secret deliberations of Bush and his team as they built the case for war against Iraq.

There you have it. Where does the trail lead?

Consider the Clinton “scandals”. It turned out that Clinton was clean when Whitewater was investigated. He did have some extramarital affairs — and he lied under oath to hide the one with Monica Lewinsky from his family — but tawdry as they may have been, they were all consensual, and there was no substance to allegations of sexual harassment. He didn't perjure himself to hide a crime, he did it to hide embarassment. There was nothing political, nothing about his service as President. Where does the trail lead? Nowhere.

In contrast, Watergate started from the particular incident of the break-in to the DNC headquarters, which was bad enough, because it was specifically about the election. But the important thing in understanding it is the trail from the crime to the cover-up of the incident, to Nixon’s involvement in the coverup — “what did the President know and when did he know it?” Which then leads inside of the Nixon White House, revealing Nixon’s whole political “dirty tricks” operation. Nixon resigned to stop any more of that from being revealed. If you want to be a truly paranoid Nixon-hating lefty like me, you can speculate about what else might have turned up in that investigation: the bombings in Cambodia, his knowledge about the Kennedy assasination, or aliens in Area 51. I’m paranoid enough to suspect that there was something dirty that would have come to light, even if it wasn’t something so melodramatic. But even without such speculative stuff, we know that Watergate definitely pointed toward Nixon’s electoral dirty tricks. Where does the trail lead? Politics, serious enough to destroy his presidency.

How about the Valerie Plame story? This isn’t about the conduct of an election campaign; the trail leads directly to the justification for the Iraq war. Libby blew Valerie Plame’s cover to punish her husband Joseph Wilson for debunking Bush’s claims about Iraq’s nuclear program. So just as Watergate led to electoral dirty tricks, so too this will lead to Iraq intelligence dirty tricks. Since we now know that Iraq had no WMDs, and the administration, including the President himself, insisted that they did, dirt throughout the administration, about the most serious issue imaginable, is a certainty. Where does the trail lead? Lies used to justify the Iraq war. Serious. More serious than Watergate.

Countdown

While we’re impatiently waiting for Fitzmas, DeLong offers us a Platonic dialogue on the subject.

Glaukon: Victoria Wilson AKA Valerie Flame AKA Valerie Wilson AKA Valerie Plame AKA Valerie Plame Wilson.

Thrasymakhos: Do you understand it?

Glaukon: No. Does anybody?

Thrasymakhos: Tom Maguire might. I doubt it.

Glaukon: Well, you don’t claim to understand it.

Thrasymakhos: Indeed not. But my not-understanding is at a very elevated and sophisticated level.

Glaukon: Do tell: what do you not understand?

I love Platonic dialogues!

Journalists?

Digby posts on Tim Russert’s revelations on the stand in the Libby trial, basically admitting that he hid what he knew about the Bush Administration's efforts to out Valerie Plame, in service of maintaining his access to White House sources.

All these famous, respected journalists were babbling incessantly about “the case” and almost none of them were telling the real story. It has taken putting them under oath in a federal trial to finally tell the public what they know about the most powerful people in the US government smearing a critic.

Can we all see what’s wrong with this picture?

Scooter

The Associated Press:

President Bush commuted the sentence of former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby on Monday, sparing him from a 2½-year prison term that Bush said was excessive.

Bush’s move came hours after a federal appeals panel ruled Libby could not delay his prison term in the CIA leak case. -

Faithful readers know I’ve been following the CIA leak case for some time.

Joshua Micah Marshall:

Specifically, the conviction stands — the fine and probation stand. Libby just doesn't have to spend a day in prison.

[⋯]

This is being treated in the press as splitting the difference, an elegant compromise. But it is the least justifiable approach. The president has decided that the sentencing guidelines and the opinion of judge don’t cut it.

The only basis for this decision is that Libby is the vice president’s friend, the vice president rules the president and this was the minimum necessary to keep the man silent.

Hilzoy:

Bush, typically, didn’t bother even trying to come up with a decent explanation for what he did. He didn’t address questions like: Mightn’t this give people the idea that there are two different standards of justice, one for people with powerful connections and another for the rest of us? Is it OK to exempt your friends from the rule of law? Isn’t it especially problematic to commute someone’s sentence when you yourself might have had a hand in that person’s criminal actions? And double especially when no one other than the now-free criminal has been held to account, despite your earlier promises?

Joe Wilson:

In so doing, he has acknowledged Mr. Libby’s guilt for, among other things, obstruction of justice, which by definition is covering up for somebody in a crime. By commuting his sentence, he has brought himself and his office into reasonable suspicion of participation in an obstruction of justice. The commutation of (Libby’s) sentence in and of itself is participation in obstruction of justice.

Senator John Edwards:

Only a president clinically incapable of understanding that mistakes have consequences could take the action he did today. [⋯] George Bush and his cronies think they are above the law and the rest of us live with the consequences.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi

The President’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence does not serve justice, condones criminal conduct, and is a betrayal of trust of the American people.

The President said he would hold accountable anyone involved in the Valerie Plame leak case. By his action today, the President shows his word is not to be believed. He has abandoned all sense of fairness when it comes to justice, he has failed to uphold the rule of law, and he has failed to hold his Administration accountable.

Publius quotes Cato from the Anti-Federalist papers ^#67.

[T]he unrestrained power of granting pardons for treason, which may be used to screen from punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the crime, and thereby prevent a discovery of his own guilt; his duration in office for four years-these, and various other principles evidently prove the truth of the position, that if the president is possessed of ambition, he has power and time sufficient to ruin his country.

Digby is “enraged”. The Poor Man’s Editors say, “Impeach them all.”

D'accord.

Fitzmas!

The verdict is in.

Libby, 56, faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison and a fine of ^$1 million.

What am I talking about? My ongoing obsession with the Plame case.

Rove Plame Novak Wilson

Why is Karl Rove about to go down in flames? I see that Digby has wrapped up the whole story in a tidy bundle for our convenience, in case you haven't been keeping up.

Press briefing

Here in Lefty Blogistan, we often take pleasure in reading Scott McClellan's circumlocutions at White House press briefings as he tries to describe Bush administration policy with a straight face. Care to join the fun? The press corps was feeling particularly lively during yesterday's briefing as they asked about Rove and Plame.

It was Rove

For those of you who have been following the Valerie Plame story, like I have: if you haven’t heard it elsewhere, it turns out that the source that leaked her identity to Novak and others was indeed Karl Rove.

If you haven't been following the story, then now’s the time to start. Rove has evidently committed a felony. Follow the links.

Forensic journalism on Bush's lost Guard duty files

Atrios points to an excellent post by Calpundit today about the “files in a wastebasket” strand of the Bush National Guard service story.

[Former Lt. Col.] Burkett’s friend and fellow guardsman, George Conn, led him to the base museum, which was run by General Scribner. Once there, Burkett saw a trashcan sitting on a table, and when he looked in he saw 20 to 40 pages of documents with George Bush’s name on them.

If this is true, the story is major league Washington scandal. You know the rules: revealation of the cover-up is always more damaging than the original issue would have been.

Beyond the implications of the story itself, Calpundit’s article is worth your time for his walk through the supporting research required in covering it.

Unlike the basic National Guard story, which has been fuelled largely by odd discrepencies in the documentary evidence, there is no documentary evidence regarding Burkett’s story. We just have his word for it, and needless to say, all the people he has accused of cleaning up Bush’s records vigorously deny it.

To judge the truth of Burkett’s story, then, all we can do is ask certain questions: Is Burkett’s story internally consistent? Has it stayed consistent over time? Do other people corroborate it? Does Burkett have a track record of telling the truth? Does he have any axes to grind?

The short answer is that I think Burkett is probably telling the truth. The long answer is — well, long.

Calpundit gives us the long answer, answering each of the questions he asked in turn, explaining why he thinks Burkett is credible but making clear what room there is for doubt. It’s good journalism.

It’s an example of the kind of forensic journalism practiced routinely by mainstream reporters. I see a little more mockery of journalists than I’d like in the blogosphere, and I think a lot of it is because too many people don’t realize how much reporting and how much judgment are behind the small snippets of writing that end up on newsprint or on the air.

[⋯]

That’s one of the nice things about blogs: if I feel like spending a lot of time on a single topic I can do it, and if I feel like posting all the detailed background information I can do that too. I hope you found it an interesting exercise.

Indeed.

This post also points to something important about how things work in American journalism now. I think that the Bush administration is hoping to dodge the bullet on the whole Guard duty story (as well as other potential scandals like the Valerie Plame story) by counting on scandal fatigue from the Clinton years. Journalists were taken for a ride in the ’90s by the not-so-vast right-wing conspiracy, spilled a lot of ink — and burned a lot of credibillity — covering countless “scandals” with no substance. My favourite example is Whitewater, a corruption “scandal” in which the Clintons actually lost money. David Brock’s strange memoir Blinded by the Right is most interesting for its description, from the inside, of how sloppy journalistic practices prevailed within the right’s smear machine.

After following these stories for years, mainstream journalists have learned the wrong lesson, and now easily dismiss potential scandals. Calpundit demonstrates what they should have done during the Clinton era, and what they should do now.

Authoritarian psychology and the liberal democratic ethos

A clarifying observation from my secret cousin ^@Politigoth:

By their nature, authoritarians respect authoritarian action. Their worldview is shaped by fear of punishment. Therefore if no one will be punished for a thing, there is no reason not to do that thing. Without punishment, all actions are valid. This is true in both religious and secular contexts. In short, if there’s nothing to make you afraid of doing X, then you can do X.

People who are not authoritarians don’t work this way, don’t think this way and don’t operate on these principles. But because of this, they make the crucial error of thinking that letting actions perpetrated in bad faith slide in the name of “someone has to make the first move” will engender a good faith response. They are continually disappointed, because this is (here’s the punchline, folks) not the lesson authoritarians learn from this gesture. They learn that rules don’t apply to them, and that there is no authority that will call them to account.

This is important to understand, especially in this moment when we are experiencing breakdowns in liberalism as in liberal democracy.

Liberalism builds institutions like legislatures as a forum where constituencies with divergent interests hash out their differences in a human process of compromise and reciprocity. It mythologizes the virtues of giving up some things you want and accepting some things you do not want so that we can all get along. This is a good myth.

But one thing that the last decade plus has taught me is that authoritarians were always just playing along with this ethos, only pretending to believe in this ideal. This breakdown in authoritarian pretense makes libdem governance hard to maintain.

Defenders of the libdem order yearn to continue to act as if we have a healthy libdem order. We do not want to act harshly, because we want a society which is not harsh. We offer our open hand, to show what we want, because we would respond to that in kind. “When they go low, we go high.” But this reflects, in part, our difficulties understanding the thinking of reflexively-authoritarian people.

Authoritarians presume that the world is cruel, that authority & power are inherently cruel, and that obedience to right authority defines the good. This is why they accept political authority which harms them, so long as it harms others more; such is the nature of power. This is why religious authoritarians look to a God of harsh judgments; such is the nature of power. This is why religious authoritarians are baffled that people who do not dread divine retribution can live moral lives; how do we recognize the good?

As ^@Politigoth says, offering the open hand sends them a confusing signal. (If you want to understand authoritarian psychology and its consequences, I strongly recommend psychology prof Dr. Bob Altemeyer’s study The Authoritarians.)

This clarifies the importance of something that has been much on my mind. Defenders of the libdem order err in leaving out elements of our own ethos for how to act. As I summarize in a recurring refrain, the libdem ethos calls for:

1. Honesty — always speak in good faith, telling the truth as well as one knows it, especially about oneʼs own ideas and intentions
2. Generosity — start from a presumption that everyone speaks & acts in good faith
3. Vigilance — always watch carefully for bad actors
4. Skepticism — demand strong evidence before accepting that someone is a bad actor
5. Transparency — publicly document evidence of bad actors
6. Safety — ruthlessly exclude demonstrated bad actors

I often lament how liberals-as-in-Democrats have failed at the necessary ruthlessness, and how the press have failed at the vigilence and stringent documentation. (I also occasionally lament when social justice advocates have elided the stringent documentation, or the starting presumption of good faith.)

I tend to think of this in terms of creating good incentives for building and maintaining a libdem order, but ^@Politigoth reminded me of something at least as important. Libdem ruthlessness when necessary bridges the gap in psychology between egalitarians and authoritarians.

Update on moral debt

After watching ^@Politigoth in a lively discussion of this point, I realized something else about authoritarian psychology. She argues, correctly, that Biden’s plan to govern with gestures toward reconciliation with conservatives will backfire, and the lack of consequences for their bad faith actions in support of DJT will read to them as a demonstration that Democrats are chumps who deserve contempt … and also that their actions were not really wrong, because there were no consequences for them.

This make me register how, to the libdem sensibility, when someone offers clemency to bad faith actors, this incurs on them a debt. They have harmed the social and political order and need to make amends. They have been granted undeserved grace on a provisional basis, will be watched more carefully, and need to invest in demonstrating that they are commited to acting in good faith and to the health of the system.

This does not register at all with authoritarians. When they break faith — which they will — they will feel baffled by how we are even angrier the next time. It will feel disproportionate to them, because they will not see the history and larger failure.

Update on Not Moving On

A comment by pacerme on a post at Emptywheel:

I truly fear the codependent belief that Dems have acted out for years, that taking the moral high ground is the moral equivalent of letting bygones be bygones. This would be what happens in domestic violence when he / she or they forget about the beating last night and move on hoping it will never happen again.

Ignoring the broken laws of the Republican Party. From Iran contra, to Plame, to Iraq war, to Russian interference in our elections, to literally torturing children on the border in a way that will alter their brains for life. Dems behave with this moral superiority that is really just codependency. Instead of living in the truth and allowing the natural consequences, as provided by our laws, the Dems intervene like the father who calls in legal favors for their drug addicted child to save the family name. Never realizing that by interfering with the natural consequences, the perception of truth is altered for the addict and that this interference may well only bolster the disease and hasten the fatal illness of addiction. (If left untreated). This doesn’t require chastisement or anger, but love and the discipline to refuse to protect that addicted child from the consequences of the disease, or the violent partner from the consequence of violent behavior.

If you love your country, you let the truth and its consequences reign. And if you are behaving outside of dysfunction you allow the consequences to speak truth to the nation. No matter how unpopular or risky that is. To refuse to do so under some self righteous belief of superiority, some hope that if we ignore it it will go away will continue to chip at our democracy. Dysfunction is contagious. Taking the moral high ground means applying the legal process for truth’s sake despite the consequences.