Bipartisan Group of Former Attorneys General and Law Professors Call on Congress to Examine Constitutional Amendment To Reverse Citizens United
As the Supreme Court returns today for its new term, a bipartisan group of law professors and prominent attorneys, including seven former state attorneys general, issued a letter criticizing the Court¹s ruling in January in Citizens United v. FEC <http://www.freespeechforpeople.org/sites/default/files/finalfsfppfaw.pdf> , which equated corporate spending in elections with free speech rights, and calling on Congress to consider a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision.
Free Speech for People and People For the American Way announced the release of the letter, which was signed by more than fifty leading law professors and attorneys, including former Massachusetts Attorneys General Frank
Bellotti and Scott Harshbarger; former Mississippi Attorney General Michael Moore; former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods; leading constitutional scholars; and numerous former federal and state prosecutors from across the
country.
The diverse group of attorneys, scholars, and public servants call the Citizens United decision ³a serious danger to effective self-government of, for and by the American people.² The signatories urge Congress to consider a
constitutional amendment to address that danger, noting that ³most of the seventeen amendments adopted since the original Bill of Rights have corrected what the American people understood were obstacles to the equal rights of all people to participate in self-government on equal terms.²
1. The focus of this book is the complicated process that led to President Obama to increase the level of U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan in support of the so-called “surge strategy.” Like all of Woodward’s previous books this book is apolitical and contains minimal analysis and commentary. It is a chronological compilation of quotes and paraphrases that Woodward has selected to demonstrate how the decision making process in this case actually worked. Woodward is a respected journalist and has a track record of accurately reflecting White House Deliberations.
2. Woodward makes it clear that President Obama’s concerns with Afghanistan so often articulated in his run for the Presidency were genuine and unfortunately well founded. The military and political situations in Afghanistan were rapidly deteriorating to the point of endangering the U.S. position there. The President wanted to formulate a new strategy that would neutralize the threats posed by al Qaeda still operating on the Afghan-Pakistan Border and transform Afghanistan into stable country that would not serve as a host to al Qaeda. To do this, he sought to obtain at least three or four strategic alternatives that he could choose from rather than simply going with the military centric strategy option that was already on the table.
3. The military centric option was favored by Admiral Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff (JCS), General Petreaus (USA) Chief of CentCom, and General McChrystal (USA). General McChrystal strongly argued that the Afghan security forces could be quickly brought up to such a level (400,000!) and that an all American Force of 40,000 troops (four brigades) could easily seize, hold, and transfer key population centers over to Afghan Security Forces. Although his optimism was at variance with actual conditions in Afghanistan, Admiral Mullen and General Petreaus supported McChrystal’s argument.
4. Still President Obama wanted to be able to review other options before committing so many troops to a failing state like Afghanistan. He also was aware that any Afghan solution would by necessity involve a Pakistani solution. The all powerful Pakistani Military had a very complex relationship with the Taliban movement and, it was suspected, al Qaeda. He therefore sought to develop a strategy that would recognize this.
5. Prior to beginning his search for alternative solutions to the Afghanistan problem the president asked Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institute to draft a Review summarizing the current situation in Afghanistan and providing some strategic insights. Riedel is a thirty year veteran of CIA, a real expert on the Near East and Central Asia, and dates from the halcyon days when intelligence analysis was still considered a profession. His review followed and expanded points he had already established in his book, The Search for al Qaeda (Brookings Institute, 2008). The Review was especially useful in clearly articulating that solving Afghanistan’s problems necessarily involved solving Pakistan’s as well. In Riedel’s opinion the center piece of any strategy should be the elimination of al Qaeda from its border strongholds in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATAs). Riedel also pointed out that it would take a long term military-civil effort to turn Afghanistan into a viable nation-state. All of the National Security Council (NSC) principals, including the military, agreed that Riedel’s Review was the most accurate information on Afghanistan, al Qaeda, and Pakistan.
6. In reading Woodward’s account it is clear that Pakistan has its own high complex agenda in Afghanistan, driven not by U.S. concerns, but by fear of India. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) appears to be playing a very dangerous game of supporting the Taliban (usually), tolerating al Qaeda yet still trying to cooperate where feasible with CIA. The ISI has one primary target and that is India; it appears that ISI considers Afghanistan just another strategic pawn, as is the U.S., in its life and death game against India. The Pakistani Military share this world view and indeed General Kayani, Chief of Staff of the Pakistan Army told Woodward as much. President Zardari of Pakistan appears weak and ineffectual, serving at the sufferance of the military.
7. Remarkably Riedel’s Review is a both timely and accurate summary of the situation in the Afghanistan-Pakistan (AfPak) yet it was developed from largely unclassified sources. Unremarkably, the U.S. Military while agreeing that the Review was an accurate situation report chose to ignore it because it did not fit into their pre-determined surge strategy which simply transferred the superficially successful Iraqi Surge model to Afghanistan.
8. Besides the Riedel Review, the NSC had remarkably little intelligence to help them in their search for alternative strategies. A close reading of Woodward’s account reveals why.
9. The simple fact of the matter is that in a reprise of the last forty years, the U.S. Intelligence System has been able to produce very effective tactical intelligence in support of military operations (i.e. locations of individuals and groups, tactical level threats etc.), but completely unable to produce strategic intelligence. Repeatedly in this book NSC participants express surprise that almost nothing is known of the organizational structures, funding, and level of Pakistani involvement in al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other affiliated groups. There is also no evidence in this book that anybody in the NSC took it upon themselves to review a reasonably extensive literature on the ethnography of Afghanistan to help clarify just what the Taliban and other Afghan groups actually are after.
10. In the end, the unrealistic strategic plan advanced by General McChrystal won out because the military simply refused to come up with any other and, in the absence of strategic intelligence nobody else could come up with a politically acceptable alternative.
1) Let's distinguish between the book and the heavy-handed (late) censorsorship. The book is an earnest personal effort by an experienced officer who knows what he is talking about. The book as now published does NOT violate even the late heavy-handed censorship. I consider the book to be an excellent overview of where US intelligence and special operations are today, along with General Mike Flynn's powerful critique “Fixing Intel-A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan,” (free online at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog).
2) Now on to the officer's loss of clearances and heavy-handed censorship.
2a) First, his loss of clearances was ABUSIVE, unwarranted, and totally reflective of the pathological operational decrepitude of our entire clearance system. I am not speaking of those who administer the system, they do the best we can. I am speaking of Colonels and Flag Officers who abuse the system to punish and silence and bankrupt–this is a form of political assassination akin to CIA's “Fitness for Duty” physicals that seek to declare any person with ethics unwilling to go along with insane or unconstitutional practices to be “crazy” and unemployable.
2b) Secondly, the book was CLEARED for publication, it is only after the fact that someone (if I had to speculate, I would guess General Ron Burgess, Director of DIA) decided that the book might make them look bad and sought desperately and foolishly to find a way to get it off the market. One of the real problems we have in our Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information world is that it turns intelligent adults into morons (Daniel Elsberg said this to Kissinger, I am just borrowing it). They actually end up with the delusion that they can “control” anything by making it secret.
The US is hosed strategically, financially, operationally, politically, and ethically. What we “do” at vast expense to the now bankrupt Treasury that has wasted over 14 trillion on the bank bail-out and over 4 trillion on an out of control Pentagon that can no longer build ships or airplanes or even provide squads with effective personal weapons or immediate area surveillance devices, is not in the public interest. Poverty has skyrocketed under this Administration precisely because it continued the previous Administrations two wars, both wars justified to the public by 935 lies led by Dick Cheney while Colin Powell stood silent.
This book is valuable, it merits five stars on its own, and now that Pentagon and CIA clumsiness have made a free online side by side version of the book available, one side as written, the other as redacted, the public has the added advantage of being able to see with great precision that 90% of the redactions are idiotic and have nothing to do with national security anything–precisely the kind of ineptitude that 90% of our expensive and unwarranted secrecy seeks to cover up across the $75 billion (going on $90 billion) secret intelligence archipelago.
I have not deleted the review and welcome the negative votes as a reminder to myself that we have differing views and that many do not see the world as I see it based on my very broad experience and very broad reading patterns. I am loyal to the Republic, to the Constitution, and to the idea that is America. Much of what we do today is inconsistent with the Constitution and the idea that is America. This book is a checkpoint in our road back to being in a state of grace with our Founding Fathers. IMHO.
At Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, in support of my latest book (free online there but better if bought in hard copy here at Amazon: INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty, I have two massive free lists of lists, the first everything that is wrong with America (according to other authors); the second everything that could be right with America (according to other authors). I am but a bridge to the thinking of others, and I commend to everyone's attention, these lists.
Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)
Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)
Bless you all–too many of you think of the author of this book, and of me, as being part of the enemy force. Not so. We are the good guys who have been left wounded on the battlefield by comrades who should have known better. Neither the chain or command nor careerism are worth dying for, but today our brave troops are dying for precisely that: ideologically and politically justified decisions divorced from reality; and flag officers prostituting themselves to careerism and not doing what I as a young lieutenant knew was my job: protecting my troops from other officers and their bad judgments.
The Pentagon's heavy-handed attempt to censor the new Afghanistan war memoir “Operation Dark Heart” by Anthony Shaffer has predictably turned a volume of narrow, specialized interest into a mainstream bestseller.
It has also focused attention on just what information the government was seeking to conceal, and why. For a review of the material that was blacked out in the second edition of the book, see “Censored book masks sensitive operations” by Sean D. Naylor, Army Times, October 4. A side-by-side view of the book's Index, in censored and uncensored formats, is here (pdf).
The combination of people-based and computer-based networks (Twitter, Lotus Connections) brought forth the story in three hours. Social networks answer questions at business speed. It verified what Google couldn't.
It pays to “cultivate your margins” and pay attention to interesting people outside of your normal channels. Gifts come from unexpected places. Who would expect a Midwestern body shop owner would find this nugget? If she didn't, would any of us ever have known it was a 3M product down there? You won't get as many good stories if you communicate with just the same people you see every day.
It was four degrees of internal separation, including me, to answer the question “is that our product?” It was answered in three hours from people on the other side of the world. Each person knew just the next person in line. If you add the Twitter feeds to me, that was two more people for a total of six. @laughingsquid found the Newsweek article, @jacquebona, who I follow, ‘RTed' it.
Google grabs what's published, not what's talked about. The social network rocks because it promotes what's naturally interesting to people. The Google robot emulates people, but not as well, or as quickly.
The little projector is STILL down there, used every day in non-spec conditions. It's 90F and very humid down there. There's a “takes a licking” story here.
The Republican grab for Congress is being funded by a pack of wolves masquerading as a herd of sheep.
How sweet and innocent they seem, these mysterious organizations with names like Americans for Job Security. Who could argue with that? Who wants job insecurity?
It turns out, according to The Washington Post, that an entity called Americans for Job Security has made nearly $7.5 million in “independent” campaign expenditures this year, with 88 percent of that total going to support Republican candidates. Who’s putting up all that money? You’ll never know, because Americans for Job Security—which calls itself a “business association”—doesn’t have to disclose the source of its funding.
Phi Beta Iota: The Supreme Court is no longer the arbiter of the Constitution or of Justice–the decision to ratify corporate personality, the most anti-democratic concept after slavery–and to allow organizations to spend freely on manipulating elections, is the nail in the coffin of the Republic. The original Republic is dead–Benjamin Franklin was correct, we could not keep it. Whether a Second American Republic arises from these ashes remains to be seen.
No Exit!, October 5, 2010
