What can I say! I have such distaste for this crap that anything that the WH and its bullwhores put out that I can barely stomach such as this talk, but it does make sense. Lets talk about this more, please. I need to get this straight in my mind first of all…ok?!
Firstly, there is this peice for Digby….I do not know how to make it in a box so forgive me, ok??!! Does Cambodia or Loas come to anyones mind here??!! It does me! Damn it all to hell anyhow!!!! down a little in his opening page
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Bush’s Secret War
by digby
Colonel Sam Gardiner is the retired colonel who taught at the National War College, the Air War College and the Naval Warfare College and who found more than 50 instances of demonstrably false stories planted in the press in the run up to the war, back in 2003. He was just on CNN:
CLANCY: Well, Colonel Gardiner, from what you’re saying, it would seem like military men, then, might be cautioning, don’t go ahead with this. But what are the signs that are out there right now? Is there any evidence of any movement in that direction?
GARDINER: Sure. Actually, Jim, I would say — and this may shock some — I think the decision has been made and military operations are under way.
CLANCY: Why?
GARDINER: And let me say this — I’m saying this carefully. First of all, Sy Hersh said in that article which was…
CLANCY: Yes, but that’s one unnamed source.
GARDINER: Let me check that. Not unnamed source as not being valid.
The way “The New Yorker” does it, if somebody tells Sy Hersh something, somebody else in the magazine calls them and says, “Did you tell Sy Hersh that?” That’s one point.
The secretary[sic] point is, the Iranians have been saying American military troops are in there, have been saying it for almost a year. I was in Berlin two weeks ago, sat next to the ambassador, the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA. And I said, “Hey, I hear you’re accusing Americans of being in there operating with some of the units that have shot up revolution guard units.”
He said, quite frankly, “Yes, we know they are. We’ve captured some of the units, and they’ve confessed to working with the Americans.”
The evidence is mounting that that decision has already been made, and I don’t know that the other part of that has been completed, that there has been any congressional approval to do this.
My view of the plan is, there is this period in which some kinds of ground troops will operate inside Iran, and then what we’re talking about is the second part, which is this air strike.
CLANCY: All right. You lay this whole scenario, but there are still a lot of caution flags that one would see out here.
GARDINER: Sure. True.
CLANCY: If they do decide on a military option…
GARDINER: Right?
CLANCY: … what’s the realistic chance of success? What’s your — your prognosis for that kind of reaction here?
GARDINER: Yes. Let me give you two answers to that. First of all, the chance of getting the facilities and setting back the program, I think the chances go from maybe two years to actually accelerating the program. You know, we could cause them to redouble their efforts. That’s on one side.
The other side is this sort of horizontal escalation by the Iranians.
My assessment is — and it’s because of regime problems at home — that if we strike, they’re likely to want to blame Israel. Now that’s — because that sells well at home.
Blaming Israel means that there’s a chance that we could see Hezbollah, Hamas targeting Israel. We could very easily see this thing escalate into a broader Middle East war, particularly when you add Muslim rage.
You know, if you take the cartoon problem and multiply it times a hundred — you know, the Danish cartoons, you could see how we could end up very quickly with a very serious problem in the Middle East.
CLANCY: Former U.S. Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner. Not a very rosy outlook here. A man who thinks the decision may have already been made.
Thank you for being with us.
GARDINER: Certainly.
My tin foil hat is beeping and honking like crazy right now. These generals coming forward is huge.
I really think it’s possible that Bush and Rummy have already got a secret war going on, one that has not been revealed to congress in any form. It’s designed that way. Bush is not going to fire Rummy — he can’t. He’s already committed himself to this thing. This could be the ultimate action of the unitary executive.
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digby 4/14/2006 01:08:00 PM Comments (49) | Trackbacks (2)
Black Reconnaissance
by digby
It’s obvious to me that this call for Rumsfeld’s resignation by six generals is about stopping this operation in Iran first and foremost. It is not a coincidence that the first salvo came from Sy Hersh last Sunday.
The question I had to ask myself was whether it was really about the nuclear thing or something more that had the military up in arms. In reading back over Hersh’s articles of the last year or so, it became quite clear to me that this has something to do with the fact that Bush instituted the plan to invade Iran more than a year ago when he believed he had been crowned Emperor in the 2004 elections — and that the plan has gone forward without any consideration of changing circumstances on the ground in Iraq. Furthermore, the plan itself comes from the same comic book from which Rummy and Newtie cooked up their RMA fantasy about invading Iraq with only 30,000 troops, a cell phone and a toothpick.
And the beauty of it is, the clandestine operation on which it depends has been folded into the Pentagon and has no congressional oversight.
February, 2005:
George W. Bush’s reelection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.
Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region. Bush’s reelection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America’s support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former high level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second guessing.
“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah – we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”
Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is Rumsfeld who has directed its implementation and has absorbed much of the public criticism when things went wrong whether it was prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib or lack of sufficient armor plating for G.I.s’ vehicles in Iraq. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for Rumsfeld’s dismissal, and he is not widely admired inside the military. Nonetheless, his reappointment as Defense Secretary was never in doubt.
Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon’s control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.
The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’ it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs” the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)
In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’ ” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”
Bush just issued a statement of support for Rumsfeld. He is stubborn and refuses to change course, as we know. But if what Hersh reported back in 2005 is correct, Rumsfeld owns him. Back in the heady days of his 2% landslide, Bush authorized a covert war with Iran, with no congressional oversight and without even the cooperation of the CINQ’s. This makes Iran-Contra look like the Canuck letter.
These retired generals are speaking for a military establishment that has been used like monopoly money by Rummy his fellow magical thinkers (like his “advisor” Newt Gingrich) who have spent the last five years attempting to destroy the military with their useless, incompetent war planning and their surreal Toffler-esque vision of a military that doesn’t require an actual army.
I realize that the armed forces always resist change. But I think it’s fair to assume, considering the Iraq cock-up, that Rummy doesn’t know what in the hell he’s doing. The military is finally saying “enough.” We are witnessing a coup by media.
The congress has completely abdicated its oversight responsibility, the media is shallow and incompetent, our allies are considered irrelevant, the UN is being run by a nutcase even more far-out that Rummy and the wishes of the people are, as usual, not considered. It looks like the only institution in America that can bring us back from the brink of a tragic, tragic mistake is the military itself.
If these guys can’t get through, and it doesn’t appear that they will, then it’s time for some of these active duty officers to resign in protest. It would take a lot of guts, but that’s their business, right?
In an article about the possible revolt of the officer corps, Fred Kaplan writes this in Slate:
MacArthur’s legacy in particular has kept even the boldest generals deeply reluctant to criticize civilian leaders over the decades. Rumsfeld’s arrogance, his “casualness and swagger” as Gen. Newbold put it–which have caused so many strategic blunders, so much death and disaster–have started to tip some officers over the edge. They may prove a good influence in the short run. But if Rumsfeld resists their encroachments and fights back, the whole hierarchy of command could implode as officers feel compelled not merely to stay silent but to choose one side or the other. And if the rebel officers win, they might find they like the taste of bureaucratic victory–and feel less constrained to renew the internecine combat when other, less momentous disputes arise in the future.
Both paths are cluttered with drear and danger. Does President Bush know this is going on? If he does, he would do the nation–and the Constitution–a big favor if he launched a different sort of pre-emptive attack and got rid of Rumsfeld now.
The problem may be that Bush can’t replace the person who is running his secret war.
Oh, and get ready for the swiftboating. I can hear them revving their engines already.
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I actually listened to CNN International this day and heard it with my own ears and saw it with my own eyes. I know it is true! The eveidence of Colonel Gardiner interview, I mean.
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Now go back to the common-sense factor of things and think like rummy, cheney,bush, et al. [I know, don’t laugh yourself out of your chair!] NOw just sit back and think about this for a moment, will you. Have we already started the infiltration and war with Iran?! Was Sy right all along and what do we do about it now??!!
After thinking about this now, lets take a good look at attitudes of members of the press corps, the military, the GOP, and might I add, all of Congress. What if they did not know what was going on in their rightful manners of notification. Did Rummy actually think he could get by with this??!! Did anyone here what Biden said this past week about this? I did and he made it sound that the Excutive would be be in serious doo doo, if this were to be true!
Have you heard any of the press really address this matter, of us being in Iran already!!!! I do not know if they have or not, for I do not listen too much of them, since they are liars anyhow.
Let me know, like I said I am here to learn and try to understand. Thanks ahead of time…