Espionage Charged Dept of State Cables

Fearing disclosure of State Dept. secrets leaked by an Army intel analyst, the feds took the hard drive of the man who turned him in. Will Bradley Manning be charged with espionage?

Defense Department investigators are weighing espionage charges against a 22-year-old Army intelligence specialist accused of leaking highly classified documents to the website Wikileaks. On Saturday, the investigators took custody of electronic records from a former computer hacker based in California who has emerged as the Pentagon's key informant in the case, the informant tells The Daily Beast.

The former hacker, Adrian Lamo, first alerted the Defense Department to the leaks by Army Specialist Bradley Manning—including a 2007 video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad, which created a sensation when posted recently by Wikileaks, as well as a cache of sensitive State Department cables.

Lamo said in an interview Saturday night that he had voluntarily turned over his computer records, including contents of one of his hard drives, to the Pentagon earlier in the day. He said criminal investigators from the Defense Department were scheduled to interview him again on Sunday near his home in California.

Lamo said he first learned that Manning might face espionage charges, a crime that could carry the death penalty, when the word "espionage" appeared on a formal release form that he was asked to sign by the Pentagon criminal investigators who took custody of his electronic records. "It's one of the statutes that was written down on a piece of paper that I signed to authorize the search," Lamo said. Calls to the Pentagon press office were not immediately returned Saturday night.

Philip Shenon, The Daily Beast

Pentagon Urges Israel to Destroy Iran

Bush Approves Israel Strike on Iran

HuffPost

Note: This ‘Okay’ is an American propaganda ploy. It would get the Republicans off the hook with Israelis replacing them.

We have no need to wage a preemptive war. It is illegal, immoral and considered murder by our religious sages. Serving long years in hell to ease the neocon burden and to fill up SUV’s is not a Jewish ambition.

Last month Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker reported that the Bush Administration has stepped up covert operations inside Iran. Now the Times of London, citing information from a senior Pentagon official, says that Bush backs an Israeli plan for a strike on that country's nuclear facilities:

President George W Bush has told the Israeli government that he may be prepared to approve a future military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities if negotiations with Tehran break down, according to a senior Pentagon official.

Despite the opposition of his own generals and widespread scepticism that America is ready to risk the military, political and economic consequences of an airborne strike on Iran, the president has given an "amber light" to an Israeli plan to attack Iran's main nuclear sites with long-range bombing sorties, the official told The Sunday Times.

"Amber means get on with your preparations, stand by for immediate attack and tell us when you're ready," the official said. But the Israelis have also been told that they can expect no help from American forces and will not be able to use US military bases in Iraq for logistical support.

Nor is it certain that Bush's amber light would ever turn to green without irrefutable evidence of lethal Iranian hostility. Tehran's test launches of medium-range ballistic missiles last week were seen in Washington as provocative and poorly judged, but both the Pentagon and the CIA concluded that they did not represent an immediate threat of attack against Israeli or US targets.

"It's really all down to the Israelis," the Pentagon official added. "This administration will not attack Iran. This has already been decided. But the president is really preoccupied with the nuclear threat against Israel and I know he doesn't believe that anything but force will deter Iran."

Shameful Days by Arianna Huffington

The last ten days have been among the most shameful in the history of American journalism.

On April 20th, the New York Times published its expose of the Bush administration's use of Pentagon-approved, prepped, and financially-enriched "military analysts" to appear on TV to help sell the invasion of Iraq, and then put a positive spin on the occupation -- even as conditions on the ground deteriorated.

It was a powerful illustration of the Bush administration's commitment to propaganda and disinformation. But it was also a damning indictment of the mainstream media's complicity in the wholesale deception of the American public on the single most important decision a country can make -- the decision to go to war.

How big a story was it? John Stauber of the Center for Media and Democracy called it the Pentagon Papers of the Iraq war.

So it only stands to reason that a story this explosive would quickly become the subject of extensive follow-ups by TV and print journalists, and endless debate on the political talk shows, right?

Wrong.

Instead of opening their reportorial and analytical floodgates, the mainstream news media have all but ignored the story.

The Times did a brief followup to its original story and, six days later, published a single editorial. Howard Kurtz wrote about the story the next day in his WaPo column and discussed it on CNN. Keith Olbermann and Wolf Blitzer gave it brief mentions. And that's about it.

A Lexis/Nexis search turned up no other coverage of this should-be major story. Nothing from Brian Williams or Katie Couric or Charlie Gibson. Nothing from Anderson Cooper or Lou Dobbs or Larry King or Campbell Brown. Nothing from Chris Matthews or Dan Abrams. Nothing from Tim Russert or George Stephanopoulos or Bob Schieffer. Nothing from anyone on Fox News.

This near-complete blackout imposed by the culpable news organizations is a despicable abdication of their central role in our society -- and has raised the ire of many in the blogosphere.

Glenn Greenwald decries the media invoking "the Kremlin-like methods of Dick Cheney -- they refuse to comment, refuse to reveal even the most basic facts about what they did, and do everything possible to hide behind the wall of secrecy they maintain." And he's incredulous that "these news outlets misleadingly shoveled government propaganda down the throats of viewers on matters of war and terrorism and they don't feel the least bit obligated to answer for what they did or knew about any of it."

"Mum's been the word on [the Times'] bombshell throughout the megamedia," writes DailyKos poster Meteor Blades. "The talking point - or perhaps the memo from on high - seems to be: Don't talk.... A hundred years of scrubbing will not remove the blood from their hands."

We've been told again and again that when it comes to Washington scandals, the cover up is worse than the crime (see Watergate and Bill Clinton not having sex with that woman). In this case, the lack of follow up is at least as bad as the crime. It is indicative of the MSM's disdain for the public and their willingness to trade their commitment to the truth for access to the halls of power.

As I've been giving interviews and speeches about my new book, specifically the points it makes about the role the media have played in the allowing the Right to hijack our democracy, I've been struck by the public's frustration at the mainstream media's Attention Deficit Disorder -- the failure to pursue important stories that, once exposed, are quickly forgotten.

Whether it's the increasing use of mercenary soldiers like those from Blackwater, corporate profiteering in the wake of Katrina, the advice of military commanders in Afghanistan being rebuffed by the Bush administration, or the military analysts scandal --- the mainstream media repeatedly allow stories to, in essence, die on the front page.

Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in American life. And it seems as if the MSM are committed to there being no second acts in American political scandals. At the end of Act I, the curtain comes down and we are quickly asked to leave the theater, left to wonder about what happens next.

We should do more than wonder. We should demand that the media mavens who enabled the Pentagon's disinformation campaign -- and, indeed, the administration's across the board effort to sell us this war -- be held accountable.

Carl Levin and others are calling for investigations into the military analysts scandal. That's good, but the cozy relationship between the White House and ABC, NBC, Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, as well as the print outlets that gave space to the Pentagon's propagandists, should be investigated as well.

Mainstream news organizations have never be very good at self-scrutiny -- look how long it took the New York Times to offer its Judy Miller/Iraq war mea culpa. And some might suggest that expecting the MSM to publicly dissect their complicity in duping the American public would be like expecting OJ Simpson, Robert Blake, and Phil Spector to find the "real killers" of Nicole, Bonny Lee, and Lana.

But that deceitful trio doesn't claim to be in the business of uncovering the truth, or functioning as a constitutionally protected check on our government.

As Justice Potter Stewart wrote on the Pentagon Papers, "without an informed and free press there cannot be an enlightened people."

And, he might have added, a free press not in bed with the government it is supposed to keep an eye on.

Media Military Analysts & the Bush Administration

NY Times quoted on Daily Kos

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as "military analysts" whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

The Authors Had One Moment of Clarity

"For many analysts (including this one), Iraq remains a 'must win,' but for many others, despite obvious progress under General David Petraeus and the surge, it now looks like a 'can't win.'"

The 'must win' dates back to when a few hundred US Marines could topple a tyrant and replace him with a leader more amenable to United Fruit. The modern despots are well aware of the colonialist smash and grab techniques.

The present era requires much more finesse witness what the EU does to its former African colonies. Even the ancient Romans were reluctant to tax an area filled with hostiles. Know thy enemy the Greek said.

The US can't govern itself democratically let alone a society and culture unknown to them. The present Fascist leadership has the American people by the throat with wires commanding the puppet limbs.

If you don't believe me, try doing something on your own volition.

Pentagon Admits the Iraq Debacle with No Clear End

By Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The war in Iraq has become "a major debacle" and the outcome "is in doubt" despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon's premier military educational institute.

The report released by the National Defense University raises fresh doubts about President Bush's projections of a U.S. victory in Iraq just a week after Bush announced that he was suspending U.S. troop reductions.

The report carries considerable weight because it was written by Joseph Collins, a former senior Pentagon official, and was based in part on interviews with other former senior defense and intelligence officials who played roles in prewar preparations.

It was published by the university's National Institute for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research center.

"Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle," says the report's opening line.

At the time the report was written last fall, more than 4,000 U.S. and foreign troops, more than 7,500 Iraqi security forces and as many as 82,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed and tens of thousands of others wounded, while the cost of the war since March 2003 was estimated at $450 billion.

"No one as yet has calculated the costs of long-term veterans' benefits or the total impact on service personnel and materiel," wrote Collins, who was involved in planning post-invasion humanitarian operations.

The report said that the United States has suffered serious political costs, with its standing in the world seriously diminished. Moreover, operations in Iraq have diverted "manpower, materiel and the attention of decision-makers" from "all other efforts in the war on terror" and severely strained the U.S. armed forces.

"Compounding all of these problems, our efforts there (in Iraq) were designed to enhance U.S. national security, but they have become, at least temporarily, an incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East," the report continued.

The addition of 30,000 U.S. troops to Iraq last year to halt the country's descent into all-out civil war has improved security, but not enough to ensure that the country emerges as a stable democracy at peace with its neighbors, the report said.

"Despite impressive progress in security, the outcome of the war is in doubt," said the report. "Strong majorities of both Iraqis and Americans favor some sort of U.S. withdrawal. Intelligence analysts, however, remind us that the only thing worse than an Iraq with an American army may be an Iraq after a rapid withdrawal of that army."

"For many analysts (including this one), Iraq remains a 'must win,' but for many others, despite obvious progress under General David Petraeus and the surge, it now looks like a 'can't win.'"

The report lays much of the blame for what went wrong in Iraq after the initial U.S. victory at the feet of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. It says that in November 2001, before the war in Afghanistan was over, President Bush asked Rumsfeld "to begin planning in secret for potential military operations against Iraq."

Rumsfeld, who was closely allied with Vice President Dick Cheney, bypassed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the report says, and became "the direct supervisor of the combatant commanders."

" ... the aggressive, hands-on Rumsfeld," it continues, "cajoled and pushed his way toward a small force and a lightning fast operation." Later, he shut down the military's computerized deployment system, "questioning, delaying or deleting units on the numerous deployment orders that came across his desk."

In part because "long, costly, manpower-intensive post-combat operations were anathema to Rumsfeld," the report says, the U.S. was unprepared to fight what Collins calls "War B," the battle against insurgents and sectarian violence that began in mid-2003, shortly after "War A," the fight against Saddam Hussein's forces, ended.

Compounding the problem was a series of faulty assumptions made by Bush's top aides, among them an expectation fed by Iraqi exiles that Iraqis would be grateful to America for liberating them from Saddam's dictatorship. The administration also expected that "Iraq without Saddam could manage and fund its own reconstruction."

The report also singles out the Bush administration's national security apparatus and implicitly President Bush and both of his national security advisers, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, saying that "senior national security officials exhibited in many instances an imperious attitude, exerting power and pressure where diplomacy and bargaining might have had a better effect."

Collins ends his report by quoting Winston Churchill, who said: "Let us learn our lessons. Never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. ... Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think that he also had a chance."

ON THE WEB

Read the report by the National Defense University.

McClatchy Newspapers 2008