Slaying the US intelligence behemoth
By Philip Smucker
WASHINGTON - Most of the United States is still suffering through the final
stages of a cataclysmic economic decline, but not so my home town of
Alexandria, Virginia, nestled along the banks of the Potomac River, a silver
dollar's toss away from the white marble statues of our founding fathers.
Recession - what recession? The military intelligence complex is thriving like
never before as has been well described through the dog-days of July in the
pages of the Washington Post.
A series of investigative reports in the Post have exposed the bloated beast of
United States intelligence as is rarely done in the home of "Beltway bandits"
and revolving door contracts.
It was the former US speaker of the House, Tip O'Neil, who said
that "all politics is local". You would think that - a decade into this "war on
terror" - that the US would have learned by now that all war and peace are also
local. Al-Qaeda and other global jihadis are tapping into a broad audience of
1.2 billion Muslims, always looking to turn a few more in their favor.
Meanwhile, Washington concentrates its dollars on feeding a voracious beast
with no brains.
There is an essential disconnect at work: Islamic perceptions are not
understood to be "hard intelligence". The US is still trying to fit a square
peg into a round hole - or to apply conventional intelligence to an
asymmetrical world.
So the beat goes on. This city relies on its big brains and intelligence
re-spun from high-tech devices and analyzed, sliced and diced by "experts" in
blue suits and pink ties. The mountain of dubious intelligence that this
behemoth produces in one day buries the good work of even the best and
brightest Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) linguists secretly ensconced in
foreign cultures abroad.
Apart from its lack of focus, there are other troubles with the convoluted
system. The Post points out that it includes "too many people obligated to
shareholders rather than the public interest". The paper calculated that
854,000 persons are keepers of "top-secret" clearances and that 265,000 of
these are contractors.
If there is a single profession that requires dedication and loyalty above all
others, it is the work of intelligence gathering. But it has been outsourced.
In Washington, Maryland and Virginia, "loyalty" is bought in cash or in kind.
As the Post also points out, "Because competition among firms for people with
security clearances is so great, corporations offer such perks as BMWs and
$15,000 signing bonuses."
An existing "TS" or "top secret" security clearance can bring a $50,000 bonus
to a so-called "body shop" that provides the US government with a flesh and
blood human who has passed the test. (Of course, it was Uncle Sam who paid for
the clearance in the first place.)
Washington's intelligence-gatherers do important work. They spy on the bad guys
and think of better ways to kill them. They also advise America's top brass and
plan for futuristic wars in different galaxies.
In many cases, these intelligence-gatherers will have come from the same
offices a year earlier and will then work at double the pay to sport a fresh
blue suit rather than a grungy green one.
Even as the Post's investigative stories get digested over fillet mignon and
washed down with sparkling water and French Champagne this summer, there are
the standard calls to kill the bottomless gusher of money spewing forth across
the land.
But the Washington establishment can rest assured that any effort to put the
bloated intelligence genie back in the bottle won't ever come to much - at
least not in anyone's lifetime.
Ever since George Washington warned that, "Over-grown military establishments
are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty," vows to curtail
military excess have gone largely unheeded in the city of his namesake.
(Certainly, it won't be former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's "tea
party" that changes the course of recent history.)
One source studying al-Qaeda's leadership explained to the Post how a new
Washington intelligence "study" gets started.
She said, "It's about how many studies you can orchestrate, how many people you
can fly all over the place. Everybody's just on a spending spree. We don't need
all these people doing all this stuff."
Of course not! But if Washington stopped paying these "experts" to defend
America, maybe it would have to deploy an army of gumshoe detectives across the
globe to discover how to better defend the woeful public. The "intelligence"
that they returned with might mean that Washington would have to suffer through
the economic hard times along with everyone else in the nation.
And while American's defense requires peace - to achieve that peace the US
actually would need to persuade Muslims the world over that it has their best
interests in mind.
That is, unfortunately, largely a matter of foreign policy, not "intelligence".
While travelling in the Islamic realm for my book, My Brother, My Enemy,
the key issues that tend to radicalize young Muslims to take up arms against my
own country became rather obvious.
These views spring from a series of key questions that linger like the smoke in
a cafe full of Egyptian hookahs (water pipes): Why are American troops
fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why is there no peace deal in Israel and
Palestine? Does President Barack Obama really want to use his brains and muscle
(spelled "leverage") to stamp out a lasting two-state peace deal? And why in
the world is Osama bin Laden still running around the mountains of Pakistan?
These questions burn for answers, but young Muslims do not have them. In fact,
they don't even have many clues. As long as they remain open quandaries,
al-Qaeda will fill the air with conspiracy theories. Its goal is to convince as
many new recruits as possible that the US would like nothing better than to
permanently "occupy" the Islamic world with its own troops and with its
"proxies".
At this stage, some readers will blame Muslims for being suckers for conspiracy
theories. It is worth remembering, however, that here in the United States
there are at least as many bizarre theories about how the World Trade Center
crashed to the ground in September 2001 and why Bin Laden is still at large as
there are across the Islamic world.
In any case, let us consider the logic of how a young Muslim male or female
might conclude from the facts on the ground that America is out to get them.
The two "occupations" that concern them the most are America's in South Asia
and Israel's in the West Bank.
These occupations were motivated by apparently unrelated events that unfolded
at different times in history.
Seen through the rose-tinted lenses of Washington, these are not occupations at
all. We still think that president Woodrow Wilson set the course of modern
American foreign policy by opposing - at least in words - colonial designs. And
unless anything has changed - which it clearly has not - Washington still
stands for freedom, democracy and an end to all oppression.
To his credit, Obama is trying to pick up where his predecessor George W Bush
dropped the ball. He has expressed abhorrence for pre-emptive war. He also
wants to finish the job in Afghanistan - clean out the rat's nest as it were -
and pressure Israel - at least a little bit - to end its occupation of the West
Bank.
To this end, an army of "intelligence" experts is backing General David
Petraeus as he pushes ahead with a counter-insurgency strategy that includes
the implicit promise not to occupy Afghanistan. (Ironically, good
counter-insurgency requires far less "American intelligence" and far more
"Afghan intelligence" in the form of tip-offs from villagers and locals.)
It should not be hard to understand, however, that the Afghan population, which
is the key to success, remains skeptical of American intentions. The war on
their own soil is now the longest in America's history. This is thanks in good
part to the "intelligence" errors that led to a bungled invasion of
Mesopotamia.
Yet it is the other key occupation in the Islamic world that forever mires
America's effort to be seen for what most of its citizen's would rather be: a
peacemaker and an advocate of democracy.
Since 1967, there has been talk about ending Israel's occupation in the West
Bank. Yet few Muslims I spoke to in my travels believe anymore that a peace
deal is likely or even possible. They don't need to read or listen to Jewish
author Akiva Eldar's excellent explanation in Lords of the Land about
the Israel Defense Forces' intimate ties with the Israeli settlement movement
to be convinced of this.
They already have their own sources of information. Unfortunately, these
include radical Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, who told me in an interview for my
book that "without resisting the occupiers, the occupation, the occupier
himself will never be convinced that he has to leave".
While Washington has convinced itself that it is facing an "offensive" jihad
from across the Islamic world, that same "jihad" is usually viewed as a
defensive one by the young Muslims susceptible to Hamas' manipulations. There
is an even worse bit of loose intelligence just hanging out there waiting to be
seized upon, however.
Israel's "occupation" in the Holy Land is conflated in the minds of Muslims
with the idea of American military "occupation" in South Asia and beyond.
Al-Qaeda's propaganda geniuses - as opposed to "intelligence experts" - have
crafted their own stealthy recruitment campaigns to incorporate these views.
Their simple and direct message: "America and Israel want you under their
boot."
A handful of leaders at the Pentagon and within Obama's national-security
apparatus already know this. Petraeus testified before the US Senate in March
after his Central Command submitted a detailed 56-page "Posture Statement",
that said, "The [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict foments anti-American sentiment,
due to a perception of US favoritism for Israel." The statement further added,
"Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize
support."
It is hard to argue with perceptions, though, particularly when you are so busy
lavishing billions on brain power inside the Beltway. As sure as George
Washington never tossed a silver dollar across the Potomac, that won't change
anytime soon.
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