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America
It was always a house of mirrors
The following reprinted article was first published in The Republic November 14, 2002
by Kevin Potvin
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US intelligence was already a bizarre labyrinth of agencies often at war with each other, more than with perceived national enemies, before September 11, 2001. The establishment of the Homeland Security Agency by US President Bush shortly thereafter added yet another layer of spying. The USA Patriot Act hugely increased the powers of surveillance for all intelligence agencies. And massive increases to budgets of intelligence agencies—mostly unknown in scale because the information is protected—have proliferated intelligence agency activities.
For example, it was revealed during the Afghanistan intervention that the CIA now has its own military force armed with ground-to-air missiles, and its own fleet of fighter and bomber jets.
So much intelligence!
Among the different known intelligence agencies are, of course, the CIA and the FBI, but several US government departments have their own intelligence agencies too. Among them are the Department of State, the Department of Energy, The Treasury, The National Security Agency, The Secret Service, and the Department of Defense. Eighty percent of the overall US intelligence budget is spent within the Department of Defense among various organizations like the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, and the intelligence arms of the four individual armed services: the navy, the air force, the army, and the marines. Lately, the Special Forces arm has become more prominent in the mix of the US military establishment, and this organization also has its own intelligence unit.
With Bush providing tens of billions of extra dollars for intelligence to fight his war on terror, the battle for pieces of this rich pie among the sprawling family of intelligence agencies is heating up. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D Wolfowitz and company “disbelieve any analysis that doesn’t support their own preconceived conclusions. The CIA is enemy territory as far as they’re concerned,” a defense official told the New York Times. A Pentagon official retorted that Wolfowitz is only challenging “cherished beliefs and assumptions” among the CIA analysts that the Pentagon believes prevents the CIA from focusing on certain information.
Last week, at a press conference, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld quoted from a 1962 intelligence document that found it was “unlikely that the Soviet bloc will provide Cuba with strategic weapons,” which was offered six months prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, in order to stress his point that valuable information can be overlooked.
More intelligent yet
To combat confusion, Rumsfeld has unveiled a new intelligence agency that has in fact been in operation since shortly after September 11, 2001, and operated by Douglass J Feith, the under-secretary of defense for policy. The new unit, the New York Times has reported, will engage in “data mining” among the information supplied by all other intelligence agencies to reveal “Iraq’s wider connections to terrorism [that] may have been obscured by formal assessments that play down the overall Iraqi threat.”
Wolfowitz, in defending the new agency, described “a phenomenon in intelligence work, that people who are pursuing a certain hypothesis will see certain facts that others won’t, and not see other facts that others will. The lens through which you’re looking for facts affects what you look for.”
Critics say that the Pentagon is engaging in propaganda to overcome the CIA and other agencies’ information about the lack of proof of any connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, which forms all the basis of justification for a Pentagon war on Iraq.
Find a threat
In such a matrix of competing interests, mutual suspicions, turf wars, and big dollars up for grabs, the contest to identify and describe new threats is not only tempting, it is necessary to bureaucratic survival. Thus, Rumsfeld was able to invent for his own new pet intelligence agency a whole new world of the imagination, at a recent press conference: “There are things we know we know, there are things we know that we don’t know, and then there are those things we don’t know that we don’t know.” It is the latter in which he finds the possibilities most fruitful.
In an essay published in Foreign Affairs earlier this year, Rumsfeld described how he created a section of analysts whose sole duty would be to dream up ways to attack US interests, so that conventional sections of analysts could work on ways to thwart those potential attacks. The lack of enough real threats could account for Rumsfeld’s need to imagine a large enough number of imagined threats to keep all the intelligence agencies busy enough.
This new section of imaginative analysts, some commentators believe, is the source of most of the alarms about possible new terrorist threats the last year. Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor, defended the need for analysts to get busy imagining new and unprecedented ways terrorists may attack US interests by arguing that “no one could have foreseen that terrorists would crash airplanes into skyscrapers.”
In fact, as Congressional testimony by CIA officials revealed last month, intelligence agents warned in the summer of 2001 that terrorists might do just that, and, that furthermore, this information went up the “chain” to the “highest political offices,” presumably including the office of the National Security Advisor.
Pre-emptive self-defence
Intelligence analysis has also been more intimately connected to military operations by Rumsfeld, in the context of the White House’s new “pre-emptive self-defence” military doctrine. This new doctrine redirects US military force away from conventional defence and reaction to attacks, and toward potential attackers before attacks take place. The case of Iraq is the litmus test of this new doctrine. Iraq presents no threat to US interests today, but the White House has argued that it might represent a threat in the future, and should be attacked before it gets the chance to attack.
If this argument is won, and Iraq is attacked by the US, it will open the floodgates to unprovoked US attacks around the world, wherever the imagination of intelligence analysts takes them. As different intelligence agencies compete with each other to imagine new and even more threatening potential adversaries in order to win bigger pieces of the intelligence budget, unsuspecting groups of people the world over will find themselves targeted and destroyed for no reason known to them—much like the way the wedding party in Afghanistan was blown up for firing their guns in the air, a standard celebratory routine at Afghan weddings.
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