Failing Tonkin Gulf Test on Ukraine
Exclusive: As the Ukraine crisis worsens, Official Washington fumes only about
“Russian aggression” — much as a half century ago, the Tonkin Gulf talk was all
about “North Vietnamese aggression.” But then and now there were other sides to
the story and questions that Congress needed to ask, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Many current members of Congress, especially progressives, may have envisioned
how they would have handled the Tonkin Gulf crisis in 1964. In their
imaginations, they would have asked probing questions and treated the dubious
assertions from the White House with tough skepticism before voting on whether
to give President Lyndon Johnson the authority to go to war in Vietnam.
If they had discovered what CIA and Pentagon insiders already knew that the
crucial second North Vietnamese “attack” on U.S. destroyers likely never
happened and that the U.S. warships were not on some “routine” patrol but rather
supporting a covert attack on North Vietnamese territory today’s members of
Congress would likely see themselves joining Sens. Wayne Morse and Ernest
Gruening as the only ones voting no.
Bravery in hindsight is always easy, but things feel quite different when
Official Washington is locked in one of its pro-war “group thinks” when all the
“important people” from government to the media to think tanks are pounding
their chests and talking tough, as they are now on Russia and Ukraine.
Then, if you ask your probing questions and show your tough skepticism, you will
have your patriotism, if not your sanity, questioned. You will be
“controversialized,” “marginalized,” “pariahed.” You will be called somebody’s
“apologist,” whether it’s Ho Chi Minh or Vladimir Putin.
And nobody wants to go through that because here’s the truth about Official
Washington: if you run with the pack if you stay within the herd you’ll be safe.
Even if things go terribly wrong even if thousands of American soldiers die
along with many, many more foreign civilians you can expect little or no
accountability. You will likely keep your job and may well get promoted. But if
you stand in the way of the stampede, you’ll be trampled.
After all, remember what happened to Morse and Gruening in their next elections.
They both lost. As one Washington insider once told me about the U.S. capital’s
culture, “there’s no honor in being right too soon. People just remember that
you were out of step and crazy.”
So, the choice often is to do the right thing and be crushed or to run with the
pack and be safe. But there are moments when even the most craven member of
Congress should look for whatever courage he or she has left and behave like a
Morse or a Gruening, especially in a case like the Ukraine crisis which has the
potential to spin out of control and into a nuclear confrontation.
Though the last Congress already whipped through belligerent resolutions
denouncing “Russian aggression” and urging a military response with only five
Democrats and five Republicans dissenting members of the new Congress could at
least ascertain the facts that have driven the Ukraine conflict. Before the
world lurches into a nuclear showdown, it might make a little sense to know what
got us here.
The Nuland Phone Call
For instance, Congress could investigate the role of Assistant Secretary of
State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in orchestrating the
political crisis that led to a violent coup overthrowing Ukraine’s
constitutionally elected President Viktor Yanukovych a year ago.
What was the significance of the Nuland-Pyatt phone call in early February 2014
in which Nuland exclaimed “Fuck the EU!” and seemed to be handpicking the
leaders of a new government? “Yats is the guy,” she said referring to her
favorite, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, with Pyatt musing about how to “midwife this
thing”?
Among other questions that Congress could pose would be: What does U.S.
intelligence know about the role of neo-Nazi extremists whose “sotin” militias
infiltrated the Maidan protests and escalated the violence against police last
February? [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Still Pretends No Coup in Ukraine.”]
And, what does U.S. intelligence know about the mysterious snipers who brought
the crisis to a boil on Feb. 20, 2014, by opening fire on police apparently from
positions controlled by the extremist Right Sektor, touching off a violent clash
that left scores dead, including police and protesters. [A worthwhile
documentary on this mystery is “Maidan Massacre.”]
Congress might also seek to determine what was the U.S. government’s role over
the next two days as three European countries Poland, France and Germany
negotiated a deal with Yanukovych on Feb. 21 in which the embattled president
agreed to Maidan demands for reducing his powers and accepting early elections
to vote him out of office.
Instead of accepting this agreement, which might have averted a civil war, neoNazi and other Maidan militants attacked undefended government positions on Feb.
22 and forced officials to flee for their lives. Then, instead of standing by
the European deal, the U.S. State Department quickly embraced the coup regime as
“legitimate.” And, surprise, surprise, Yatsenyuk emerged as the new Prime
Minister.
What followed the coup was a Western propaganda barrage to make it appear that
the Ukrainian people were fully behind this “regime change” even though many
ethnic Russian Ukrainians in the east and south clearly felt disenfranchised by
the unconstitutional ouster of their president.
A U.S. congressional inquiry also might ask: Was there any internal U.S.
government assessment of the risks involved in allowing Nuland and Pyatt to
pursue a “regime change” strategy on Russia’s border? If so, did the assessment
take into account the likely Russian reaction to having an ally next door
overthrown by anti-Russian extremists with the intent to put Ukraine into NATO
and potentially bring NATO armaments to Russia’s frontyard?
Since the entire crisis has been presented to the American people within an
anti-Yanukovyh/anti-Moscow propaganda paradigm both by the U.S. mainstream news
media and by the U.S. political/academic elites there has been virtually no
serious examination of the U.S. complicity. No one in Official Washington dares
say anything but “Russian aggression.”
Post-Coup Realities
Beyond the events surrounding the coup a year ago, there were other pivotal
moments as this crisis careened out of control. For instance, what does U.S.
intelligence know about the public opinion in Crimea prior to the peninsula’s
vote for secession from Ukraine and reunification with Russia on March 16?
The State Department portrayed the referendum as a “sham” but more objective
observers acknowledge that the vote although hasty reflected a broad consensus
inside Crimea to bail out of the failed Ukrainian state and rejoin a somewhat
more functional Russia, where pensions are about three times higher and have a
better chance of being paid.
Then, there was the massacre of ethnic Russians burned alive in Odessa’s trade
union building on May 2, with neo-Nazi militias again on the front lines. Like
other topics that put the U.S.-backed coup regime in a bad light, the Odessa
massacre quickly moved off the front pages and there has been little follow-up
from international agencies that supposedly care about human rights. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’ Reality.”]
The next major catastrophe associated with the Ukraine crisis was the shooting
down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17. Again, the
State Department rushed to a judgment blaming the ethnic Russian rebels and
Russia for the tragedy that killed all 298 people onboard. However, I’ve been
told that some U.S. intelligence analysts had a very different take on who was
responsible, finding evidence implicating a rogue element of the Ukrainian
government.
However, following the pattern of going silent whenever the Kiev coup regime
might look bad, there was a sudden drop-off of interest in the MH-17 case,
apparently not wanting to disrupt the usefulness of the earlier anti-Russian
propaganda. When a Dutch-led inquiry into the crash issued an interim report
last October, there was no indication that the Obama administration had shared
its intelligence information. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Danger of an MH-17
Cold Case.”]
There also is little interest from Congress about what the MH-17 evidence shows.
Even some progressive members are afraid to ask for a briefing from U.S.
intelligence analysts, possibly because the answers might force a decision about
whether to blow the whistle on a deception that involved Secretary of State John
Kerry and other senior Obama administration officials.
This sort of cowardly misfeasance of duty marks the latest step in a long
retreat from the days after the Vietnam War when Congress actually conducted
some valuable investigations. In the 1970s, there were historic inquiries into
Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, led by Sen. Sam Ervin, and into CIA
intelligence abuses by Sen. Frank Church.
A Downward Spiral
Since then, congressional investigations have become increasingly timid, such as
the Iran-Contra and October Surprise investigations led by Rep. Lee Hamilton in
the late 1980s and early 1990s, shying away from evidence of impeachable
wrongdoing by President Ronald Reagan. Then, in the 1990s, a Republicancontrolled Congress obsessed over trivial matters such as President Bill
Clinton’s personal finances and sex life.
Congressional oversight dysfunction reached a new low when President George W.
Bush made baseless claims about Iraq’s WMD and Saddam Hussein’s intent to share
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons with al-Qaeda. Rather than perform any
meaningful due diligence, Congress did little more than rubber stamp Bush’s
claims by authorizing the Iraq War.
Years afterwards, there were slow-moving investigations into the WMD
intelligence “failure” and into the torture practices that were used to help
fabricate evidence for the fake WMD claims. Those investigations, however, were
conducted behind closed doors and did little to educate the broader American
public. There apparently wasn’t much stomach to call the perpetrators of those
abuses before televised hearings.
The only high-profile foreign-affairs hearings that have been held in recent
years have been staged by House Republicans on the made-up scandal over an
alleged cover-up of the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, a
hot-button issue for the GOP base but essentially a non-story.
Now, the United States is hurtling toward a potential nuclear confrontation with
Russia over Ukraine and this congressional ineptness could become an existential
threat to the planet. The situation also has disturbing similarities to the
Tonkin Gulf situation although arguably much, much more dangerous.
Misleading Americans to War
In 1964, there also was a Democratic president in Lyndon Johnson with
Republicans generally to his right demanding a more aggressive military response
to fight communism in Vietnam. So, like today with President Barack Obama in the
White House and Republicans demanding a tougher line against Russia, there was
little reason for Republicans to challenge Johnson when he seized on the Tonkin
Gulf incident to justify a ratcheting up of attacks on North Vietnam. Meanwhile,
also like today, Democrats weren’t eager to undermine a Democratic president.
The result was a lack of oversight regarding the White House’s public claims
that the North Vietnamese launched an unprovoked attack on U.S. warships on Aug.
4, 1964, even though Pentagon and CIA officials realized very quickly that the
initial alarmist reports about torpedoes in the water were almost surely false.
Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1964 was a young Defense Department official, recounts
in his 2002 book Secrets how the Tonkin Gulf falsehoods took shape, first with
the panicked cables from a U.S. Navy captain relaying confused sonar readings
and then with that false storyline presented to the American people.
As Ellsberg describes, President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara
announced retaliatory airstrikes on Aug. 4, 1964, telling “the American public
that the North Vietnamese, for the second time in two days, had attacked U.S.
warships on ‘routine patrol in international waters’; that this was clearly a
‘deliberate’ pattern of ‘naked aggression’; that the evidence for the second
attack, like the first, was ‘unequivocal’; that the attack had been
‘unprovoked’; and that the United States, by responding in order to deter any
repetition, intended no wider war.”
Ellsberg wrote: “By midnight on the fourth, or within a day or two, I knew that
each one of those assurances was false.” Yet, the White House made no effort to
clarify the false or misleading statements. The falsehoods were left standing
for several years while Johnson sharply escalated the war by dispatching a half
million soldiers to Vietnam.
In August 1964, the Johnson administration also misled Congress about the facts
of the Tonkin Gulf incident. Though not challenging that official story, some
key members worried about the broad language in the Tonkin Gulf resolution
authorizing the President “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed
attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression
including the use of armed force.”
As Ellsberg noted, Sen. Gaylord Nelson tried to attach an amendment seeking to
limit U.S. involvement to military assistance not a direct combat role but that
was set aside because of Johnson’s concern that it “would weaken the image of
unified national support for the president’s recent actions.”
Ellsberg wrote, “Several senators, including George McGovern, Frank Church,
Albert Gore [Sr.], and the Republican John Sherman Cooper, had expressed the
same concern as Nelson” but were assured that Johnson had no intention of
expanding the war by introducing ground combat forces.
In other words, members of Congress failed to check out the facts and passed the
fateful Tonkin Gulf resolution on Aug. 7, 1964. It should be noted, too, that
the mainstream U.S. media of 1964 wasn’t asking many probing questions either.
Looking back at that history, it’s easy for today’s members of Congress to think
how differently they would have handled that rush to judgment, how they would
have demanded to know the details of what the CIA and the Pentagon knew, how
they wouldn’t let themselves be duped by White House deceptions.
However, a half century later, the U.S. political/media process is back to the
Tonkin Gulf moment, accepting propaganda themes as fact and showing no
skepticism about the official line. Except today, Official Washington’s war
fever is not over a remote corner of Southeast Asia but over a country on the
border of nuclear-armed Russia.
[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “President Gollum’s ‘Precious’
Secrets”; “NYT Whites Out Ukraine’s Brownshirts”; and “Nuclear War and Clashing
Ukraine Narratives.”]
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book,
America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush
Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The
trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click
here.
Did North Korea Really Hack Sony?
Exclusive: The Obama administration has accused North Korea of hacking Sony in
retaliation for “The Interview,” a goofball comedy about assassinating the
country’s real-life leader, but the case may be another politicized rush to
judgment by the U.S. government, writes James DiEugenio.
By James DiEugenio
One of the major problems with modern American democracy is the fact that the
U.S. government has a serious credibility problem. This is not new of course. In
its contemporary strain, it goes back at least to 1964 when two events focused
and magnified the problem. The first was the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was
used to launch the Vietnam War. The second was the issuance of the Warren
Report, the widely doubted official account of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
As Kevin Phillips demonstrated with polling results in his book Arrogant
Capital, that year marked the beginning of a long decline in the public’s trust
in the government’s ability to do what is right most of the time. Prior to that
year, the number hovered in the mid-70 percentile. After that, the figure began
to drop steeply. It bottomed out at 19 percent in 1992. (This was clearly a
large factor in boosting the presidential candidacy of Ross Perot that year.) It
has failed to recover in any significant way since.
Historically speaking, it’s easy to name some of the causes for this headlong
slide into skepticism and disbelief: the escalation in Vietnam, the
assassinations of key leaders during the 1960s, Watergate, the Iran/Contra
affair, the exposure of CIA drug-running during wars in Southeast Asia and
Central America.
As Nicolas JS Davies has pointed out, some more recent examples would be the
false reasons for the invasion of Iraq, the dubious attribution of imminent
nuclear weaponry for Iran, the attempt to accuse President Bashar al-Assad of
Syria of using sarin gas against civilians, and the attempt to blame Russia for
the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
As the reader can see, many of these instances involve the effort of certain
reactionary members of the Executive Branch in Washington and their allies in
the media to use the American military abroad. One would have thought that after
the disastrous results of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, the major media would
investigate more carefully what now seems to be a recurrent pattern of ersatz
attribution to provoke American intervention. But, by and large, the doubts
about these events have been expressed only in the alternative media.
The final incident Davies (briefly) mentioned was last year’s computer hacking
of Sony/Columbia studios, which the FBI blamed on North Korea. The ostensible
reason for this cyber-attack was the upcoming release of the comedy film, The
Interview, which depicted an interview by a fictional American TV personality
with Kim Jong-un, the actual leader of North Korea.
This interview becomes a pretext for an assassination attempt that goes awry.
But, as the movie unfolds, the interview does happen and Kim does not come off
well in it. This causes him to try to kill the Americans responsible. It
backfires and he is killed instead.
Perhaps no film since Oliver Stone’s JFK generated as much pre-release
controversy as The Interview. But unlike Stone’s picture, which created a
sensation over its contrary-to-the-Establishment view of
President Kennedy’s assassination, this particular brouhaha is largely based
upon the alleged cyber-attack by North Korea.
When the FBI pointed the finger at Pyongyang, Sony/Columbia decided not to
release the film, citing security concerns. Both people in the film colony and
in the media met that decision with much derision. Therefore, Columbia
reconsidered and did a limited theatrical run for the film, combined with a
large online release. Due to the massive coverage of the controversy, the latter
has been a big success. In fact, it has set records in that category.
‘The Interview’ as a Movie
The movie was co-directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who also had a hand
in writing the story. Along with James Franco, Rogen also stars in the film.
Rogen and Goldberg have been friends since childhood in Vancouver, Canada.
Rogen’s career took off after he moved to Los Angeles and met writer-director
Judd Apatow, who produced Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and directed The
40 Year Old Virgin.
After first using Rogen in a TV series called Freaks and Geeks, Rogen starred in
Apatow’s 2007 film Knocked Up. Apatow then produced two films written by Rogen
and Goldberg, Pineapple Express and Superbad. Franco was also in Freaks and
Geeks, and Pineapple Express with Rogen. Rogen and Goldberg then scripted The
Green Hornet in 2011; they wrote and co-directed This Is the End in 2013.
Reportedly, Rogen once advised Apatow to make his work more “outrageously
dirty.” [Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2007] And Apatow once said he wanted to
include a penis in each of his films. [The Guardian. Aug. 26, 2008]
Well, we get those kinds of jokes in The Interview. The premise of the film
revolves around Franco as a TV personality named Dave Skylark, the host of a
rather lowbrow interview show titled Skylark Tonight. Rogen plays the producerdirector of the program and has ambitions of doing something more socially and
politically significant, a la 60 Minutes.
In one of the several unfathomable plot twists in the film, Kim likes Skylark
Tonight so much that he wants to be a guest on the show and to arrange the guest
spot through Rogen. But, in another hard to buy plot twist, Kim wants to arrange
the interview in some sparsely populated rural area in China. (I think this
segment was designed to generate laughs, which it does not.)
The visit to North Korea is now set up with a female military representative of
Kim’s. Upon Rogen’s return, he and Franco celebrate and they announce the
upcoming event on the air.
Now, another rather hard to believe strophe occurs. The CIA visits the two men
and asks them to assassinate Kim. No specific reason is given as to why (though
Kim is widely viewed in the West as a clownish and unstable dictator), or why
they chose these two utter amateurs for such a daring, high-risk scheme.
The CIA wants them to kill Kim with a toxic poison attached to the palm of their
hands. This strip is hidden in a pack of gum. But when they arrive in North
Korea, one of their military guards takes out the pack and chews the strip. He
spits it out, and in a rather unfunny follow-up, we later watch him die from the
poison at a dinner.
Franco now meets Kim. The North Korean is on his best behavior and the two hit
it off for a couple of days playing basketball and partying with some scantily
clad girls.
Twisting the Plot
But now, another rather weird plot twist occurs. Franco wanders out of the
presidential palace, going to what he thought was a grocery store nearby. He
goes inside and discovers that the store is really a Potemkin village. That is,
things like fruit and vegetables are really painted props.
Obviously, this scene is intended to highlight the shortage of food supplies in
North Korea, but why the North Koreans would plant the store so close to the
palace, why they would leave it unattended, and why they could not import real
goods to stock it at this crucial time, these kinds of questions make this
episode another head-scratcher. But the plot device explains why Franco turns on
his new friend, Kim Jong-un.
In the meantime, Rogen has fallen for the female military attaché. It turns out
she secretly hates Kim and now allies herself with the Americans. She says they
cannot just kill him; they must humiliate him on TV so the Korean people will
see him as a pretentious buffoon and charlatan.
So, Franco/Skylark decides to structure the interview to expose Kim. But the
station technicians cut the feed. Rogen and his girlfriend then pull out
firearms, touching off a bloody fight in the control room also involving Korean
troops. Somehow, the amateur Americans kill all the Koreans. Franco is shot at,
but he survives because he had a bulletproof vest on.
The trio manages to escape in a tank (no, I won’t explain how that happened) and
are pursued by Kim and some soldiers in a helicopter. Kim orders preparations
for a nuclear launch. But the tank fires a heat-seeking missile that takes out
the chopper. Some CIA double agents then help Rogen and Franco escape the
country.
At the end, we see Franco at a book reading about the whole affair as Rogen
talks to his North Korean girlfriend via Skype. She stayed behind to democratize
the country.
As the reader can see, the story is pretty much escapist, goofball fiction with
a plot focused on murdering a real-life leader. But as bad as the script is, the
direction by Rogen and Goldberg is even worse.
The Decline of Comedy
In 1965, before he retired from the field, illustrious film critic Dwight
MacDonald wrote an essay entitled “Whatever Happened to Hollywood Comedy?”
There, he lamented how low the genre had fallen from the Alpine peaks attained
by the likes of Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd and Langdon. Or even from the hills of
Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch and Howard Hawks.
MacDonald outlined three rules that comic films he was reviewing broke almost
systematically. First, he wrote that most of the films had no appealing comic
protagonists, which he felt was necessary in the genre. Second, he said they
were overproduced and too Rube Goldberg-like in their construction and
depiction. (Rogen and Goldberg shoot the helicopter exploding at the end in
super-slow-motion.)
Finally, according to MacDonald, the sadism inherent in comedy could not be
shown realistically, i.e., if the comic actually broke his back while slipping
on a banana peel, that would not be funny.
Well, in the fight in the control room in The Interview, we watch as not one,
but two fingers get bitten off. Apparently, no one on the set said to Rogen, “Uh
Seth, is that really funny?” Rogen is an even worse director than he is an
actor. And the man can’t act.
If MacDonald felt gloomy about the state of film comedy in 1965, one can imagine
what he would have written in later years, which leads us to the first question
about the hacking mystery: Unless the North Koreans are as imbecilic as the
people depicted in the film, could they really have thought that such a
frivolous production somehow imperiled the security or image of their country
and to such an extent that they went ahead and risked retaliation by hacking
into a private company’s computer system?
To me, the risk simply does not equate with whatever reward was to be had. But
there are other indications that the case against North Korea is not nearly as
conclusive as the FBI wants us to think. President Barack Obama may have
compounded the problem by announcing retaliatory sanctions on Jan. 2. Further,
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest implied there would be more of this
because he called it “the U.S. government’s first action”
The Facts of the Case
The controversy actually began to take shape last June when the North Korean
ambassador to the United Nations, without seeing the movie in all of its
silliness, condemned the film and urged the United States to cancel its
distribution. Clearly, making light of assassinating a nation’s leader is
problematic, whatever one may think of the leader, and the North Koreans made
their disgust clear.
Then, on Nov. 24, 2014, Columbia discovered that its computers had been hacked.
Their employees were locked out and an ugly caricature of a bright red skeleton
popped up on their screens that morning. A message appeared which said, “Hacked
by #GOP.” Later, personal information, e-mails and unreleased films were leaked
online. The films included Still Alice, Annie and To Write Love on Her Arms.
In this context, GOP does not refer to the Republican Party but to a hacking
group that calls themselves the Guardians of Peace. It’s interesting to note
that although North Korea denies the attack, Guardians of Peace takes credit for
it. In fact, the Guardians actually called the FBI a bunch of idiots because of
the stupidity of their investigation.
As Kim Zetter pointed out in Wired, nation-states usually don’t announce
themselves with images of blazing skeletons or criticize their victims for
having poor cyber security, nor do they post stolen data to Pastebin, which is
sort of the unofficial warehouse for heisted files on the cloud.
As Zetter writes, “These are all hallmarks of hacktivists, groups like Anonymous
and LulzSec, who thrive on targeting large corporations for ideological reasons
or by hackers sympathetic to a political cause” (Wired, Dec. 17, 2014)
Cyber-security expert Marc Rogers agreed that the operation did not look like it
was from a nation-state, and he criticized the FBI’s case on specific grounds,
noting that because the malware was written in Korean means little, since
programs exist to translate that code.
Rogers also said that whoever wrote the malware had extensive knowledge of hardcoded paths and passwords. This would suggest that whoever did the attack was
somehow watching Sony/Columbia’s computer architecture for a long time or was a
company insider because not only did the hackers know where certain files were
located but they knew the access codes on them.
Third, Rogers wrote that when a hacker simply dumps this amount of material onto
a public site, that has the earmarks of a hack job from some ideologically
motivated group. There was much information North Korea could have garnered from
the huge access they allegedly had. And this could have served them well in
their intelligence files. Why make it public? (See Roger’s blog, “Marc’s
Security Ramblings” entry dated Dec. 18, 2014)
More Skepticism
Rogers is backed up on his first point by Kurt Stammberger, senior vicepresident of Norse, a company that provides computer intelligence systems and
technology to both private corporations and the government.
Stammberger has been in possession of the specific malware used in the Sony
hack as far back as last July, which can be secured by interested parties on the
black market. His sample of the program is totally in English, not a trace of
Korean.
The executive noted that specific Sony credentials, server address and digital
codes and certificates were then written into the malware. As another authority
in the field noted, certain malware behaves erratically. It just dives into a
system, shuffles around the computer and spirals around looking for things to
link to randomly. The Sony hack was more like a cruise missile.
“This stuff was incredibly targeted. That is a very strong signal that an
insider was involved,” said Stammberger. (New York Post, Dec. 30, 2014) Thus, he
concluded that “It’s virtually impossible to get that information unless you are
an insider, were an insider, or have been working with an insider. That’s why we
and so many other security professionals are convinced an insider played an
important role.”
Furthering this belief is the fact that, last spring, Sony issued layoff notices
to hundreds of employees. A private Facebook group made up of former Sony
employees voted by a large majority that the hack was an inside job. An exemployee said what makes this even more possible is that Sony’s security was not
very tight or sophisticated, a point that was echoed by Rogers. (Dana Liebelson,
Huffington Post, Jan. 6, 2015)
In fact, Norse, Stammberger’s computer-intelligence company, went even further.
They named a former employee as a suspect, along with five accomplices. They did
this by going through hacked personnel files and then locating a disgruntled
employee online. (The Security Ledger Dec. 18, 2014)
In one message, for instance, one of Stammberger’s suspects identified as “lena”
wrote :“Sony doesn’t lock their doors, physically, so we worked with other staff
with similar interests to get in. I’m sorry I can’t say more, safety for our
team is important.” (The Wrap, Dec. 30, 2014)
From this and other evidence, Stammberger deduces that the conspiracy was a
collaboration between an employee or employees terminated early last summer and
a hacking group involved in distributing pirated movies online, a group that has
been pursued by Sony.
The FBI visited Norse to hear this presentation and seemed suitably impressed.
But Stammberger said the FBI didn’t reveal anything from its inquiry to Norse.
Chronology Problems
What makes the whole operation even more puzzling is the fact that an e-mail was
sent to Sony executives three days before the hack became public, on Nov. 21,
2014, addressed to top executives such as CEO Michael Lynton and Chairperson Amy
Pascal (among others). It reads:
“Monetary compensation we want. Pay the damages, or Sony Pictures will be
bombarded as a whole. You know us very well. We never wait long. You’d better
behave wisely.”
Clearly, the fact that this was sent in advance indicates that whoever sent it
knew what was about to happen. But the warning contains no mention, not even a
hint, about censoring an about-to-be-released movie. The message appears to be
pure and simple extortion, as is clearly denoted in the first sentence about
money.
But what makes this piece of evidence ultimately confusing is that it was signed
by “God’sApstls,” a rubric that also was in one of the malicious files used in
the cyber attack. (ibid)
As Wired’s Zetter points out, it was only on Dec. 8, a week after a logjam of
media stories appeared linking the attack to North Korea, that the attackers
made a reference to the film in one of their announcements. And after this, the
hackers made oblique terrorist threats against the film’s premiere in New York
on Christmas Day.
In other words, it was after the finger-waving at North Korea had begun that
“the GOP” began to explicitly link the film to the crime. To top that, as Sam
Biddle noted in The Gawker on Dec. 22, the self-declared attackers, “the GOP”,
then released a message declaring that Sony/Columbia had their permission to
release The Interview anyway, which certainly implies that whoever did the
hacking was simply bluffing about any terrorist attacks if the film were shown.
Lessons Not Learned
This points out another interesting aspect of the case, which Peter Singer,
another security expert, expounded on at Motherboard. In an interview, he said:
“This is not just now a case study in how not to react to cyber threats and a
case study in how not to defend your networks; it’s now also a case study in how
not to respond to terrorism threats.
“We have just communicated to any would-be attacker that we will do whatever
they want. It’s mind-boggling to me, particularly when you compare it to real
things that have actually happened. Someone killed 12 people and shot another 70
people at the opening night of Batman: The Dark Knight Rises. They kept that
movie in the theater. You issue an anonymous cyber threat that you do not have
the capability to carry out: We pulled a movie from 18,000 theaters.” (Sic, that
number is exaggerated.)
Singer said whoever conducted the attack understood the American psyche and
culture to the point of knowing that politicians like John McCain and Newt
Gingrich would call it an attack of “cyber terrorism” and demand retaliation and
that no one would ask: Why?
Would North Korea really commit its scarce resources and take this geopolitical
risk over a witless, very bad comedy and think that a fitting retaliation would
be to publicize how much money Sony executives make or that producer Scott Rudin
thinks Angelina Jolie is only marginally talented?
Gauging by the U.S. overreaction, one is reminded of what Orson Welles did with
a radio microphone, four actors, and some mood music in 1938 with his broadcast
of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.
Singer added that this image of Sony/Columbia as a frightened and intimidated
victim benefits the company because it conceals the fact that it has been hacked
before, going back to 2005, and more than once.
Yet, their whole computer architecture has been relatively unchanged, even
though the previous hacks were not labeled as attacks from a nation-state. It’s
fairly clear that Sony did not take the attacks seriously enough to do a major
upgrade on their security system or to change passwords and pass codes every few
months.
Obviously, they could afford the financial outlay to do such things.
Obama’s Hypocrisy
On the day the FBI announced North Korea as the culprit, President Obama
criticized Sony’s initial decision to pull the film from theaters. Echoing what
Singer said, the President commented: “We cannot have a society in which some
dictator in some place can start imposing censorship here in the USA. If
somebody can intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical comedy, imagine what
they’ll do when they see a documentary or political film they don’t like.”
He continued in this vein, “That’s not what we are, that’s not what America is
about. I’m sympathetic that some private company was worried about liabilities.
I wish they’d spoken to me first. Do not get into a pattern in which we’re
intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.”
Obama did not seem aware of the irony, either in regards to his own
participation in actual assassinations, i.e., “targeted killings” via drone
attacks, or his administration’s aggressive effort to silence U.S. government
whistleblowers through criminal prosecutions, examples of real censorship.
In response to Obama’s expressed disappointed that Sony had not come to him for
help, Sony CEO Michael Lynton contradicted this observation the same day it was
made on Dec. 19. In a statement made on CNN, the executive said, “We definitely
spoke to a senior advisor in the White House about the situation. The White
House was certainly aware of the situation.”
Lynton added that Sony consulted with the State Department before the hacking to
anticipate any political controversy the film could provoke. But Lynton went
even further, saying Sony went to think tanks, foreign policy authorities, and
the State Department “to get an understanding of whether or not there was a
problem” with the film. The CEO said he was told by all that there was no
problem, so they proceeded with the advertising rollout of the film.
Lynton said it really was not Sony that pulled the film from theatrical release
but rather too many major exhibitors refused to show the film for fear of
possible terrorist attacks. He concluded that he “had no alternative but to not
proceed with the theatrical release on the 25th of December.” (Deadline, Dec. 19,
2014)
Weighing the Evidence
Of course, it is possible that these accusations against North Korea are
correct. However, as of today, there is a large body of expert opinion that says
the evidence so far is lacking. In fact, another expert, Robert Graham of Errata
Security, was even more unimpressed than Rogers, calling the FBI’s evidence
“nonsense.” (New York Post, Dec. 30, 2014)
If that is so, then the Sony hack may end up joining the long line of instances
in which the U.S. government either jumped to misguided conclusions or
intentionally misled the American people. Meanwhile, the real culprits escape
and the real facts become harder to ascertain since the U.S. government hates to
admit mistakes especially when the falsely accused have been thoroughly
demonized and have few defenders.
If the truth is discovered many years down the line, the major news media
usually ignores it or, in the rare case that the truth is acknowledged and
accepted, it is way past the time for avoiding dangerous actions rationalized by
the false allegations.
It took Professor Edwin Moise three decades to produce the definitive book on
the Tonkin Gulf incident, showing that just about everything President Lyndon
Johnson said about what happened there was wrong. By then, millions of
Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans were dead.
James DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era. His most recent book
is Reclaiming Parkland.
How LBJ Was Deceived on Gulf of Tonkin
As war hawks today push President Obama into more and more confrontations, there
is an echo from a half century ago when Vietnam War hawks manipulated President
Johnson into a bombing campaign in retaliation for the phony Gulf of Tonkin
incident, as Gareth Porter recalls.
By Gareth Porter
For most of the last five decades, it has been assumed that the Tonkin Gulf
incident was a deception by Lyndon Johnson to justify war in Vietnam. But the
U.S. bombing of North Vietnam on Aug. 4, 1964, in retaliation for an alleged
naval attack that never happened — and the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that followed
was not a move by LBJ to get the American people to support a U.S. war in
Vietnam.
The real deception on that day was that Secretary of Defense Robert S.
McNamara’s misled LBJ by withholding from him the information that the U.S.
commander in the Gulf — who had initially reported an attack by North Vietnamese
patrol boats on U.S. warships — had later expressed serious doubts about the
initial report and was calling for a full investigation by daylight. That
withholding of information from LBJ represented a brazen move to usurp the
President’s constitutional power of decision on the use of military force.
McNamara’s deception is documented in the declassified files on the Tonkin Gulf
episode in the Lyndon Johnson library, which this writer used to piece together
the untold story of the Tonkin Gulf episode in a 2005 book on the U.S. entry
into war in Vietnam. It is a key element of a wider story of how the national
security state, including both military and civilian officials, tried repeatedly
to pressure LBJ to commit the United States to a wider
war in Vietnam.
Johnson had refused to retaliate two days earlier for a North Vietnamese attack
on U.S. naval vessels carrying out electronic surveillance operations. But he
accepted McNamara’s recommendation for retaliatory strikes on Aug. 4 based on
reports of a second attack. But after that decision, the U.S. task force
commander in the Gulf, Capt. John Herrick, began to send messages expressing
doubt about the initial reports and suggested a “complete evaluation” before any
action was taken in response.
McNamara had read Herrick’s message by mid-afternoon, and when he called the
Pacific Commander, Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp Jr., he learned that Herrick had
expressed further doubt about the incident based on conversations with the crew
of the Maddox. Sharp specifically recommended that McNamara “hold this execute”
of the U.S. airstrikes planned for the evening while he sought to confirm that
the attack had taken place.
But McNamara told Sharp he preferred to “continue the execute order in effect”
while he waited for “a definite fix” from Sharp about what had actually
happened.
McNamara then proceeded to issue the strike execute order without consulting
with LBJ about what he had learned from Sharp, thus depriving him of the choice
of cancelling the retaliatory strike before an investigation could reveal the
truth.
At the White House meeting that night, McNamara again asserted flatly that U.S.
ships had been attacked in the Gulf.
When questioned about the evidence,
McNamara said, “Only highly classified information nails down the incident.” But
the NSA intercept of a North Vietnamese message that McNamara cited as
confirmation could not possibly have been related to the Aug. 4 incident, as
intelligence analysts quickly determined based from the time-date group of the
message.
LBJ began to suspect that McNamara had kept vital information from him, and
immediately ordered national security adviser McGeorge Bundy to find out whether
the alleged attack had actually taken place and required McNamara’s office to
submit a complete chronology of McNamara’s contacts with the military on Aug. 4
for the White House indicating what had transpired in each of them.
But that chronology shows that McNamara continued to hide the substance of the
conversation with Admiral Sharp from LBJ. It omitted Sharp’s revelation that
Capt. Herrick considered the “whole situation” to be “in doubt” and was calling
for a “daylight recce [reconnaissance]” before any decision to retaliate, as
well as Sharp’s agreement with Herrick’s recommendation. It also falsely
portrayed McNamara as having agreed with Sharp that the execute order should be
delayed until confirming evidence was found.
Contrary to the assumption that LBJ used the Tonkin Gulf incident to move U.S.
policy firmly onto a track for military intervention, it actually widened the
differences between Johnson and his national security advisers over Vietnam
policy. Within days after the episode Johnson had learned enough to be convinced
that the alleged attack had not occurred and he responded by halting both the
CIA-managed commando raids on the North Vietnamese coast U.S. and the U.S. naval
patrols near the coast.
In fact, McNamara’s deception on Aug. 4 was just one of 12 distinct episodes in
which top U.S. national security officials attempted to press a reluctant LBJ to
begin a bombing campaign against North Vietnam.
In September 1964, McNamara and other top officials tried to get LBJ to approve
a deliberately provocative policy of naval patrols running much closer to the
North Vietnamese coast and at the same time as the commando raids. They hoped
for another incident that would justify a bombing program. But Johnson insisted
that the naval patrols stay at least 20 miles away from the coast and stopped
the commando operations.
Six weeks after the Tonkin Gulf bombing, on Sept. 18, 1964, McNamara and
Secretary of State Dean Rusk claimed yet another North Vietnamese attack on a
U.S. destroyer in Gulf and tried to get LBJ to approve another retaliatory
strike. But a skeptical LBJ told McNamara, “You just came in a few weeks ago and
said they’re launching an attack on us they’re firing at us, and we got through
with the firing and concluded maybe they hadn’t fired at all.”
After LBJ was elected in November 1964, he continued to resist a unanimous
formal policy recommendation of his advisers that he should begin the systematic
bombing of North Vietnam. He stubbornly argued for three more months that there
was no point in bombing the North as long as the South was divided and unstable.
Johnson also refused to oppose the demoralized South Vietnamese government
negotiating a neutralist agreement with the Communists, much to his advisers’
chagrin. McGeorge Bundy later recalled in an oral history interview that he
concluded that Johnson was “coming to a decision to lose” in South Vietnam.
LBJ only capitulated to the pressure from his advisers after McNamara and Bundy
wrote a joint letter to him in late January 1965 making it clear that
responsibility for U.S. “humiliation” in South Vietnam would rest squarely on
his shoulders if he continued his policy of “passivity.” Fearing, with good
reason, that his own top national security advisers would turn on him and blame
him for the loss of South Vietnam, LBJ eventually began the bombing of North
Vietnam.
He was then sucked into the maelstrom of the Vietnam War, which he defended
publicly and privately, leading to the logical but mistaken conclusion that he
had been the main force behind the push for war all along.
The deeper lesson of the Tonkin Gulf episode is how a group of senior national
security officials can seek determinedly through hardball and even illicit
tactics to advance a war agenda, even knowing that the President of the United
States is resisting it.
Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S.
national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism
for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book Manufactured
Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, was published Feb. 14.
Should We Fall Again for ‘Trust Me’?
Exclusive: Forgetting lessons from the Tonkin Gulf to the Iraq War, the U.S.
news media has mostly elbowed past doubts about whether the Syrian government
launched the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack and now is focused on the political
drama of congressional approval for war, a big mistake says ex-CIA analyst Ray
McGovern.
By Ray McGovern
In a dazzling display of chutzpah, the White House is demanding that Congress
demonstrate blind trust in a U.S. intelligence establishment headed by James
Clapper, a self-confessed perjurer.
That’s a lot to ask in seeking approval for a military attack on Syria, a
country posing no credible threat to the United States. But with the help of the
same corporate media that cheer-led us into war with Iraq, the administration
has already largely succeeded in turning public discussion into one that assumes
the accuracy of both the intelligence on the apparent Aug. 21 chemical weapons
attack in Syria and President Barack Obama’s far-fetched claim that Syria is
somehow a threat to the United States.
Here we go again with the old political gamesmanship over “facts” as a prelude
to war, a replay of intelligence trickery from Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin
to Iraq’s nonexistent WMD. Once more, White House officials are mounting a fullcourt press in Congress, hoping there will be enough ball turnovers to enable
the administration to pull out a victory, with the corporate media acting as
hometown referees.
And in the weekend talk shows, Secretary of State John Kerry, team co-captain in
this transparent effort to tilt the playing field, certainly had his game face
on. Kerry left little doubt that he KNOWS that the Syrian government is guilty
of launching a chemical weapons attack on suburbs of Damascus on Aug. 21. How do
we know he knows? Simple: It’s “Trust me” once again.
Did you not watch Kerry’s bravura performance before the TV cameras on Friday
when he hawked the dubious evidence against the Syrian government? Someone
should tell Kerry that using the word “know” 35 times does not suffice to dispel
well-founded doubts and continuing ambiguities about the “intelligence,” such as
it is. The administration’s white paper, issued to support Kerry’s “knowledge,”
didn’t provide a single verifiable fact that established Syrian government
guilt. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “A Dodgy Dossier on Syrian War.”]
But with his bravado, Kerry’s ploy was obvious to sweep aside serious questions
about the evidence and move the discussion simply to one of how much punishment
should be inflicted on Syria. “So now that we know what we know, the question …
is: What will we do?” Kerry said Friday.
But, Mr. Kerry, please not so fast with your attempt to do an Iraq War number on
us. Frankly, asking us to simply trust you (especially after your 2002 vote for
President George W. Bush’s Iraq War resolution) is too much to ask. Given the
disease of prevarication circulating like a virus among top intelligence
officials, one would have to have been “born yesterday” (to use one of Harry
Truman’s expressions) to take you at your word.
And, there are hopeful signs that Congress, which has been fooled more than once
before, may see through this latest rush to judgment. “Yes, I saw the classified
documents,” Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, told The Hill newspaper. “They were
pretty thin.”
Some lawmakers are even stating another obvious point; i.e., that even with
congressional approval, a military strike on Syria would be not only an
international crime, but also unconstitutional because of the Constitution’s
supremacy clause making treaties the supreme law of the land.
Under the United Nations Treaty, signatories like the U.S. pledge not to use or
even threaten to use military force against another nation without U.N. Security
Council approval or unless already attacked or in imminent danger of attack.
None of those conditions apply here.
So, even if the “intelligence” against Syria were air-tight (which it isn’t) and
if Congress approves a use-of-force resolution, the U.S. Constitution still
requires that we abide by the U.N. Treaty and obtain Security Council
approval. How can lawyers like Obama and Kerry ignore such basics?
There are also other options for punishing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad if
there’s real evidence that he was complicit in the Aug. 21 attack. Like other
leaders accused of war crimes, he can be indicted by the International Criminal
Court or subjected to a special war-crimes tribunal. Yet, instead of following
those legal strategies, which are specifically designed for these sorts of
situations, President Obama proposes punishing one alleged war crime by
committing another.
Intelligence? A Sow’s Ear
But there remains the key question of establishing the Assad government’s guilt
and whether the Obama administration’s “high-confidence” assessment about that
point is justified. It is a time-honored (or, better, time-dishonored) custom
for White House officials bent on war to distort or even manufacture
“intelligence” to justify their aims, especially after they’ve gone public with
their “knowledge.”
On this point, I can say “with high confidence”
that the White House is at it
again, perpetrating another fraud on Congress and the American people. And most
of the U.S. mainstream press has elbowed past the many questions about the
quality of the intelligence and has moved on to discussing whether President
Obama will “win” or “lose” the congressional vote, whether partisanship will
spill over into foreign policy hurting America’s “credibility” to look tough.
Was it just a little over a decade ago that we watched President George W. Bush
and Vice President Dick Cheney create out of whole cloth intelligence to
“justify” war on Iraq while the U.S. press corps mostly acted as stenographers
and cheerleaders? Mistakes are forgivable; fraud is not; neither is cowardice in
the face of a misguided rush to war. And the fact that not a single senior Bush
administration official was held accountable compounds the problem.
Since many Americans, malnourished as they are by the corporate media, need to
be reminded, let’s say it again: The pre-Iraq “intelligence” was not mistaken;
it was fraudulent. And, sad to say, then-CIA Director George Tenet and his
malleable managers were willing accomplices in that fraud. You need not take my
word for it.
Just five years ago, in June 2008, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Jay
Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, announced the conclusions of a five-year committee
investigation into pre-Iraq War intelligence approved by a bipartisan majority
of 10-5 (Republican Senators Chuck Hagel and Olympia Snowe voting with the
Democratic majority).
Emphasizing the committee’s conclusion that the Bush administration made
significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence, Rockefeller
declared, “In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented
intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or
even non-existent.”
Pressure on Intelligence Analysts
My former CIA analyst colleague, Paul R. Pillar, who, as National Intelligence
Officer for the Middle East before the attack on Iraq, experienced up-front and
personal the extreme pressure that intelligence analysts feel when a president
has decided to make war, addressed this problem recently in “The Risk of
Distorting Intelligence.” Pillar pointed out that an Associated Press story on
the Obama administration’s preparation of the public for a military strike on
Syria included these statements:
“The White House ideally wants intelligence that links the attack [with chemical
weapons] directly to Assad or someone in his inner circle, to rule out the
possibility that a rogue element of the military act[ed] without Assad’s
authorization. That quest for added intelligence has delayed the release of the
report by the Office of the Director for National Intelligence laying out
evidence against Assad. The CIA and the Pentagon have been working to gather
more human intelligence tying Assad to the attack.”
Pillar adds, “When one hears that policy-makers want not just intelligence on a
particular subject but intelligence that supports a particular conclusion about
that subject, antennae ought to go up. A ‘quest’ for conclusion-bolstering
material is fundamentally different from an open-minded use of intelligence to
inform policy decisions yet to be made. It is instead a matter of making a
public (and Congressional) case to support a decision already made.”
This was the kind of highly politicized “policy kitchen” in which intelligence
analysts and other officials were pressured to serve as cooks whipping up the
frothy broth labeled “Government Assessment of the Syrian Government’s Use of
Chemical Weapons,” lauded by Secretary of State Kerry on Friday. The manner in
which it was issued shows it to be a “policy statement,” NOT an “intelligence
summary,” as widely described in the media. And, clearly, there were too many
cooks involved.
In contrast to key past issuances of similarly high political sensitivity, the
“Government Assessment” released on Friday does not appear under the letterhead
of the Director of National Intelligence as was the case, for example, with the
official statement issued on Sept. 28, 2012, “on the intelligence related to the
terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.”
This break in customary practice may have been simply a function of Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper being in such bad odor among those lawmakers
who still care about truth. Clapper has confessed to telling Congress, under
oath, “clearly erroneous” things about the
National Security Agency’s
surveillance abuses.
Thus, the administration runs some risk in trotting out Clapper this week to
testify before the intelligence and national security committees of Congress.
Perhaps the White House has decided it has to rely on Clapper’s demonstrated
gift for lying with a straight face (though sweaty pate); or it may be counting
on short-term memory loss on the part of the many superannuated and/or
distracted members of Congress.
Clapper’s Record
Well before Obama appointed him Director of National Intelligence three years
ago, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper showed himself to be a subscriber
to the George Tenet doctrine of compliant malleability, having helped Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld falsify the intelligence on weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq. Did no one tell Obama about Clapper’s key role in the
cooking of intelligence before the Iraq War?
Rumsfeld handpicked Clapper to be the first civilian director of the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), where he served during the crucial period
of September 2001 to June 2006. NGA’s responsibilities included analysis of
satellite imagery the most capable and likely collection resource to discover
weapons of mass destruction facilities in Iraq or to verify Iraqi “defector”
reports of hidden WMD caches.
So why didn’t NGA point out the absence of WMD evidence or note the many
discrepancies in the stories being told by the “defectors” many of whom were
coached by the pro-invasion Iraqi National Congress? The answer: Clapper knew
which side his bread was buttered on. Instead of speaking truth to power, he not
only fell in with the Tenet school of obeisance, but also glommed onto Donald
Rumsfeld’s aphorism: “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Working for Rumsfeld, Clapper’s job, pure and simple, was to stifle any
untutored-to-the-ways-of-Washington analyst who might ask unwelcome questions
like: Could the reason there is not a trace of Iraqi WMD in any of the satellite
imagery be that there is none there and that the Pentagon’s favorite “defectors”
are lying through their teeth?
When no WMD caches were found, it was Clapper who suggested, without a shred of
evidence, that Saddam Hussein had sent the phantom WMD to Syria, a theory that
also was pushed by neocons both to deflect criticism of their false assurances
about Iraq’s WMD and to open a new military front against another Israeli
nemesis, Syria.
(It appears that time may have finally come.)
On more substantive issues like the key one, “why they hate us” Clapper has
advanced some imaginative theories about what makes terrorists tick. It’s “selfradicalization,” you see. Clapper promoted this bedeviling concept while a
nominee for the post of Director of National Intelligence, which he having
played fast and loose with the truth, aside still occupies.
At his nomination hearing Clapper was asked by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida,
about lessons drawn from the investigation of Army Major Nidal Hasan, the
psychiatrist sentenced to death last week for killing 13 people at Fort
Hood. Clapper responded that “self-radicalization” is a “daunting challenge. I
don’t have the answer to the challenge; identification of self-radicalization
may not lend itself to detection by intelligence agencies. It’s almost like
detecting tendencies for suicide ahead of time.”
Still Far From a Silk Purse
If intelligence community leaders have any pride left, they may also have been
embarrassed by how last Friday’s “Government Assessment” fit the old
bureaucratic image of a camel as the arch-typical horse designed by
committee. Seldom have my intelligence alumni colleagues and I seen a more
meandering, repetitive, fulsome document. Full of verisimilitude, the document
nonetheless includes this key acknowledgment: “Our high confidence assessment is
the strongest position that the U.S. Intelligence can take short of
confirmation.”
It seems a safe bet that during the next two weeks’ testimony before the various
national security committees of the Senate and House, Kerry and Clapper will
claim that additional intelligence has “confirmed” what until now has been
simply the “assessments” of the U.S. government. Let’s hope that lawmakers have
the good sense to ask for actual evidence that can withstand independent
scrutiny.
Colin Powell’s meretricious U.N. speech on Feb. 5, 2003, was at least well
crafted and persuasively presented. In a same-day assessment, we Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) gave him an A for presentation,
while almost flunking him (with a C-minus) for substance. In our Memorandum for
the President that day, we urged that the discussion be widened beyond the
circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we saw no compelling
reason and from which we believed the unintended consequences were likely to be
catastrophic.
If President Obama would let us in the door, we would tell him the same thing
today, since he has surrounded himself with a menagerie of “tough guys and gals”
as well as some neocons and neocons-lite. Before Kerry went on TV Friday, VIPS
had already warned Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey “there are serious
problems with the provenance and nature of the ‘intelligence’ that is being used
to support the need for military action.” Those problems remain.
Tonkin Gulf
From my own personal life experience, there was another good example of how the
prostitution of intelligence works: When the Tonkin Gulf incident (used to
“justify” the Vietnam War) took place 49 years ago, I was a journeyman CIA
analyst in what Condoleezza Rice has called “the bowels of the agency.” As an
intelligence analyst responsible for Russian policy toward Southeast Asia and
China, I worked very closely with those doing analysis on Vietnam and China.
At the time, the U.S. had about 16,000 troops in South Vietnam, but there was
mounting political pressure to dramatically expand the U.S. troop levels to
prevent a Communist victory. President Lyndon Johnson feared that Republicans
would blame him for “losing Vietnam” the way some tarred Harry Truman for
“losing China.” So the Gulf of Tonkin incident North Vietnamese allegedly firing
on a U.S. destroyer in international waters offered Johnson the chance both to
look tough and to get a congressional carte blanche for a wider war.
Those of us in intelligence not to mention President Johnson, Defense Secretary
Robert McNamara and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy knew full well that
the evidence of any North Vietnamese attack on the evening of Aug. 4, 1964, the
so-called “second” Tonkin Gulf incident, was highly dubious.
But it fit the President’s purposes. The North Vietnamese could be presented as
aggressors attacking a U.S. ship on a routine patrol in international waters. To
make the scam work, however, the American people and members of Congress had to
be kept in the dark about the actual facts of the case, all the better to whip
them into a war frenzy.
Only years later was the fuller story revealed. During the summer of 1964,
President Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were eager to widen the war in
Vietnam. They stepped up sabotage and hit-and-run attacks on the coast of North
Vietnam. Defense Secretary McNamara later admitted that he and other senior
leaders had concluded that the seaborne attacks “amounted to little more than
pinpricks” and “were essentially worthless,” but they continued.
Concurrently, the National Security Agency was ordered to collect signals
intelligence from the North Vietnamese coast on the Gulf of Tonkin, and the
coastal attacks were seen as a helpful way to get the North Vietnamese to turn
on their coastal radars. The destroyer USS Maddox, carrying electronic spying
gear, was authorized to approach as close as eight miles from the coast and four
miles from offshore islands, some of which already had been subjected to intense
shelling by clandestine attack boats.
As James Bamford describes it in Body of Secrets: “The twin missions of the
Maddox were in a sense symbiotic. The vessel’s primary purpose was to act as a
seagoing provocateur, to poke its sharp gray bow and the American flag as close
to the belly of North Vietnam as possible, in effect shoving its 5-inch cannons
up the nose of the Communist navy. In turn, this provocation would give the
shore batteries an excuse to turn on as many coastal defense radars, fire
control systems, and communications channels as possible, which could then be
captured by the men … at the radar screens. The more provocation, the more
signals…
“The Maddox’ mission was made even more provocative by being timed to coincide
with commando raids, creating the impression that the Maddox was directing those
missions and possibly even lobbing firepower in their support. North Vietnam
also claimed at least a twelve-mile limit and viewed the Maddox as a trespassing
ship deep within its territorial waters.”
On Aug. 2, 1964, an intercepted message ordered North Vietnamese torpedo boats
to attack the Maddox. The destroyer was alerted and raced out to sea beyond
reach of the torpedoes, three of which were fired in vain at the destroyer’s
stern. The Maddox’s captain suggested that the rest of his mission be called
off, but the Pentagon refused. And still more commando raids were launched on
Aug. 3, shelling for the first time targets on the mainland, not just the
offshore islands.
Early on Aug. 4, the Maddox captain cabled his superiors that the North
Vietnamese believed his patrol to be directly involved with the commando raids
and shelling. That evening at 7:15 (Vietnam time) the Pentagon alerted the
Maddox to intercepted messages indicating that another attack by patrol boats
was imminent.
What followed was panic and confusion. There was a score of reports of torpedo
and other hostile attacks, but no damage and growing uncertainty as to whether
any attack actually took place. McNamara was told that “freak radar echoes” were
misinterpreted by “young fellows” manning the sonar, who were “apt to say any
noise is a torpedo.”
This did not prevent McNamara from testifying to Congress two days later that
there was “unequivocal proof” of a new attack. And based largely on that,
Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf resolution allowing Johnson to escalate the war
with intense aerial bombardments and the dispatch of more than a half million
U.S. troops, 58,000 who would die along with estimates of several million
Vietnamese and other people of Indochina.
Meanwhile, in ‘the Bowels’
However, by the afternoon of Aug. 4, 1964, the CIA’s expert analyst on North
Vietnam (let’s call him “Tom”) had concluded that probably no one had fired on
the U.S. ships. He included a paragraph to that effect in the item he wrote for
the Current Intelligence Bulletin, which would be wired to the White House and
other key agencies and appear in print the next morning.
And then something unique happened. The Director of the Office of Current
Intelligence, a very senior officer whom Tom had never before seen, descended
into the bowels of the agency to order the paragraph deleted. He explained:
“We’re not going to tell LBJ that now. He has already decided to bomb North
Vietnam. We have to keep our lines open to the White House.”
“Tom” later bemoaned, quite rightly: “What do we need open lines for, if we’re
not going to use them, and use them to tell the truth?”
The late Ray S. Cline, who as Deputy Director for Intelligence was the currentintelligence director’s boss at the time of the Tonkin Gulf incident, said he
was “very sure” that no attack took place on Aug. 4. He suggested that McNamara
had shown the President unevaluated signals intelligence that referred to the
(real) earlier attack on Aug. 2 rather than the non-event on the 4th. There was
no sign of remorse on Cline’s part that he didn’t step in and make sure the
President was told the truth.
Though we in the bowels of the agency knew there was no Aug. 4 attack and so did
some of our superiors everyone also knew, as did McNamara, that President
Johnson was lusting for a pretext to strike the North and escalate the war. And,
like B’rer Rabbit, nobody said nothin’.
Let’s hope that, this time on Syria, at least one or two senior intelligence or
policy officials will find a way to get the truth out heeding their own
conscience and oath to support and defend the Constitution rather than succumb
to the ever-present temptation to give priority to being part of the President’s
“team.”
Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church
of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served in CIA from the
administrations of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush, including as
drafter and briefer of the President’s Daily Brief under Presidents Nixon, Ford,
and Reagan. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS).