[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 98 (Monday, June 18, 2007)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1326-E1327]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
RECOGNIZING THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF CAROL DUMAINE
______
HON. JAMES P. MORAN
of Virginia in the House of Representatives
Monday, June 18, 2007
Mr. MORAN of Virginia. Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor the accomplishment of Ms. Carol Dumaine, of Reston, Virginia, and a proud member of our civil service. Ms. Dumaine, an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, has contributed to our Nation's future security through the establishment of the Global Futures Forum (GFF), a highly innovative think tank which coordinates international expertise to enhance intelligence analysis.
As the 9/11 Commission confirmed, intelligence and law enforcement officials had uncovered a number of warning signs that a terrorist attack on U.S. soil was imminent, but the failure to recognize the links between the intelligence precluded authorities from stopping the attacks. Ms. Dumaine has created a forum which allows for more thorough intelligence analysis from a cadre of outside experts. Global Futures Forum (GFF) unites intelligence experts from different nations with professionals from diverse fields so that emerging issues can be recognized quickly and collectively addressed. The GFF reviews intelligence in the public domain and promotes open, interactive linkages to knowledge and insight that exists outside of traditional security organizations.
GFF delegates represent the wide spectrum of intelligence and security organizations, multilateral institutions, academia and non-
government personnel from more than 30 nations. A series of forums in 2005 and 2006 brought these experts together to work face-to-face, providing them with an opportunity to strengthen international partnerships and to share knowledge about global security challenges. To ensure that partners would have opportunities to collaborate outside of the conferences, Ms. Dumaine created the GFF website to provide a constant means of collaboration, allowing GFF partners to share their latest thoughts, research and analysis through their own interactive blogs or chats with other participants. Her work ensures that the dialogue fostered by the GFF never really ends.
Ms. Dumaine created a global community that increases exposure to diverse perspectives and catalyzes discussion on adapting intelligence organizations to address nontraditional challenges. These partnerships created through Ms. Dumaine's effort will help ensure that potential security threats will be handled properly, allowing for the best response possible. For her great contribution to the intelligence community, she has been selected as a finalist for the Partnership for Public Service's “National Security Medal”.
Madam Speaker, I commend Ms. Dumaine for her leadership, and I am proud to have her live in Virginia's 8th Congressional District as she contributes to the greatest civil service in the world. I wish her all the best in her future endeavors.
The One Book No US Politician Will Read, That You SHOULD Read
June 18, 2007
Barry M. Lando
This is one of two books that I have read together, both documenting the decades of deceit by both the US and UK governments, and to a much lesser degree, by France, Germany, and Russia, among others.
The two compelling facts that stay with me as I put the book down, are two:
1) From Churchill to Kennedy to Bush (Cheney), all of our Presidents in the US, but most especially Reagan, Bush, Clinton (Brzezinski), and the current and failed crew of neo conservatives that use Bush Junior as a talking doll, have been complicit–let me spell that again–complicit in the mass murders, the massacres, the torture that we first condoned and now practice ourselves. The US White House denizens are all long overdue for formal indictment, at least by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The author documents, very ably, a long string of broken promises (e.g. to the Bedouin leader for a free Arab state in return for help in WWI, to the Kurds, etc.) and complicity in mass murder. In the author's views, the sanctions are a war crime against the children, women, and elderly of Iraq, a war crime that lasted thirteen years.
2) Salaam Hussein was a creature spawned in large part by the CIA. Although I have spent 30 years in the intelligence business, it was not until I embarked on my broad non-fiction reading program that I have been able to understand that the CIA specifically, but all the rest of the classified intelligence community, is complicit in mass murders, genocides, running cocaine into the US to wipe out poor communities now addicted to crack, made affordable by the CIA's drug runners, and made politically kosher because Wall Street demands drug money–laundered drug money–for its liquidity.
I join Lee Iacocca in asking, “Where is the outrage?” There is not a candidate for President today, not even Ron Paul, who can outline in chapter and verse, as I now can on the shoulders of the 900+ authors whose hard-earned insights I have absorbed these past six years, the evil that Lionel Tiger and others show is inherent in industrialization and the centralization of power. We need to destroy the current corrupt elections process, implement electoral reform across the board, and start putting bright honorable people in office, instead of these nakedly immoral and profoundly evil creatures who will inflict any sacrifice, impose any burden, on We the People so that they may profit.
A few of the many gems from this superb work:
1) All our Presidents in recent time have lied to us, and the most humiliating of all of these lies was not the weapons of mass destruction, but the abandonment of the Kurds and the refusal to listen when Iraqi generals approached Iraqi dissidents who in turn came to the Department of State only to be shunned away. Salaam Hussein promised to leave Kuwait, but US wanted to destroy his army, and refused to hold off on what proved to be 40 hours of pure slaughter. Gulf II was not only more lies, but the active suppression of facts and dissident views, not least of which were General Tony Zinni's views–he was called a traitor by Condolezza Rice, who appears to know nothing of honor, decency, and truthfulness.
2) CIA is creating more long-term havoc than it is worth. I am finally persuaded, with absolute certainty, that we need to get out of the covert action business. CIA should become the National Analysis Agency, and the small clandestine arm should be limited to multinational operations against transnational crime and terrorism, with an Inspector General in every Station.
3) Jimmy Carter, advised by Zbig Brzezinski, comes out of this book looking both more ignorant and more unscrupulous than Reagan or either of the Bushies. Brzezinski not only masterminded the tacit okay for Pakistani development of nuclear weapons in return for aid in Afghanistan, he also began the process of helping Salaam Hussein acquire, develop, and utilize weapons of mass destruction, and I hold Brzezinski directly accountable for the mass murder of Kurds, Iraqi Shiites, and Iranians.
There are many other notes from this book that I have, but rather than lay them out here I am going to simply say that this book moves to the top of my list of books on evaluating the Iraq misadventure that has given us a $2 trillion debt and 75,000 amputees whose lives are forever shattered ***for no good reason***
The betrayal of the public trust by both the Executive and Congress, by both politicians and senior civil servants and military flag officers, has been outrageous. The author uses the words ignorance, arrogance, incompetence, amorality, illegality, hypocrisy, and cynicism sparingly. This is not a vendetta book. This is a reasons indictment and joins a host of other books that demand the immediate impeachment not only of the sitting President and Vice President, but also of the Republican ***and*** Democratic leadership in the Senate and the House of Representatives.
I am ashamed of our Republic and what these amoral thieves have done “in our name.” I am disheartened by the knowledge that all of our brave troops have died, been disabled, and suffered for ***no good reason.*** This makes me very angry. Angry enough to begin speaking out, pleading with America to wake up and find within itself the means for a non-violent restoration of the Constitution and We the People as individuals with liberty for all, lest America be disgraced, and our children's' futures sacrificed, forevermore. Shame, shame, shame.
I served as a spy for CIA on three clandestine tours, and one of my headquarters tours was in counterintelligence, where I got to know just how un-seriously CIA takes that topic. The dirty little secret at CIA is that Ames was not the only traitor, a brand new career trainee gave up ten or so of our Soviet agents in place, all killed. In this movie, the damage that Hansen did is severely over-stated, and the facts of the matter are not as they should be, but I still give this a five star rating because the movies is absolutely top notch on the personality details.
This movie is much superior to The Good Shepard. The only other spy movies that really come close are those featuring Alec Guiness as George Smiley.
The reviewers that cannot understand motive will never understand spys and traitors. One line in this movie really grabbed me–in it, Hansen talks about how “the US can be likened to a powerfully built but retarded child.” Throughout the movie, Hansen is cast as a devout even obsessive Catholic who cannot get people inside the FBI to realize how vulnerable they are, and ultimately I would conclude from the movie that the motivation may have started as a desire to prove a point, then a slow burn into addiction–making fools of those that would not listen.
The movie misrepresents the clerk as counter-spy. The FBI actually caught Hansen by going through his trash and finding the one note that he failed to destroy. Still and all the individual depictions, from the hardened solitary female senior special agent with no one in her life, not even a cat, to various others, are excellent. Especially meaningful to me is the depiction of the loving wife that becomes suspicious and then unloving because she confuses her husband's loyalty to duty and secrecy with inattention and being scorned, and of course that is rarely the case. Spies need loving trusting wives.
This and “The Falcon and the Snowman” are first rate. Anything with Alec Guiness as George Smiley is first rate. For amusement I like the more recent James Bond films, the Smiths, and True Lies.
Other speakers have pointed out, as the book's foreword does as well, that most of Chomsky's Op Eds are widely published overseas but not in the US. I completely agree with the general view among intelligent people that the mainstream print and broadcast media, including NPR which now works for Otto Reich, Karl Rove's best post-Nazi pal, are worthless. As Joe Trippi says, “the revolution will not be televised,” nor will it be discovered by any “news hole” reporter whose column inches are subordinate to advertising and info-mercials from the powers that be. I recall with anger that $100,000 full page ads, cash offered up front, were REFUSED by the NYT, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post. Shame!
As I usually do with Chomsky's works, I start with the last item, and then go back to the beginning. The heart of this book in my view is two-fold:
1) American intellectuals on both left and right, are timid, ignorant, lazy, and generally a pitiful mess. They have all fallen prey to ideological fantasy or agnostic oblivion. Absent Chomsky, Sy Hersh, and a few others (not counting authors like Francis Moore Lappe and others in the transpartisan mode), our media–broadcast, print, and web–is completely lacking and totally distorted in its failure to be a responsible fourth estate.
2) We the People have the power to change all this. Interestingly (at least to me), as Chompsky's book arrived via UPS I was reading the introduction by Lawrence Goodwyn to “The Populist Movement: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America” (Oxford, 1979). Both Chomsky and Goodwyn see clearly that there is a corporate dominance of “the national interest” that is completely at variance, 180 degrees contrary to “the public interest.” This may well be the single most significant political concept we must communicate to every American eligible to vote in 2008.
Chomsky makes much–and in my mind very properly so–of how the people and the varied organizations subordinate to the banks, corporations, and puppet government (both federal and state) have been “domesticated” to believe that the existing system is “as good as it gets” and that nothing can come of a popular revolt. However, and here I draw on Goodwyn, it is clear that the people can reach a breaking points, a point beyond which their suffering cannot be explained by “hard times” or “genetic sloth” or any of the other propaganda terms used to try to keep the 90% that do all the work still for their screwing by CEOs and Wall Street and the Federal Reserve.
Reading Chomsky is like a bracing splash of cold water. Early on in the book, an item dated 1 November 2002 (the dates for each Op-Ed are always present and much appreciated), he offers a modest proposal: that if the US insists on toppling Hussein, that it simply commission Iran to do so, and offer all the support it previously offered to Iraq against Iran. What an insane idea, he points out at the end, only to pointedly suggest that the only idea MORE insane is for the US to go it alone and lightly.
This morning I was re-reading Adda Bozeman's introduction to her brilliant work, “Strategic Intelligence & Statecraft,” and recalling how in 1992 (the same year that I tried to get the USG to take open sources of information seriously) she was very pointedly stating that the heart of strategic intelligence lay in understanding the cultural and religious values of others. Not something CIA has a clue about, especially today when 4 out of 5 “analysts” (more like junior butts in seats) have less than five years experience.
Chomsky is gifted at speaking truth to power, and it is significant that more and more people are reading what he writes–just as more and more people are reading my non-fiction reviews–the American public is now “engaged” and emergent from its slumber. Sadly, when other try to replicate his truth-telling, citing chapter and verse from “Sorrows of Empire,” or “War is a Racket” or “The Fifty Year Would,” or “Why the Rest Hate the West,” we get slammed down. Just yesterday I was told that a superb monograph on Intelligence & Information Operations (I2O) would be published officially, but only if I took out all the “conspiracy theory” quotes. The first one, on page 3, quoted General Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine of his era, saying he did not like being an enforcer for corporations. So much for speaking the truth in Pentagon circles (where I usually get fairly free rein, to their credit).
Chomsky's other oft-repeated theme, but with all new words in all new Op-Eds tailored to the post 9/11 era, is that it is America that is the global terrorist, America that is the evil-doer. Let me be among those who stand with Chomsky. I declare, as the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction; as a former Marine Corps infantry officer, clandestine spy for the CIA, founder of the Marine Corps Intelligence Command, and devoted citizen and father with roots in the Commonwealth of Virginia, Chomsky is correct. We are losing the global war of belief systems because we refuse to recognize our grotesque migration from a free people to an evil empire in which the people have no say over what is being done “in their name.” Sun Tzu knew that only those who know BOTH themselves, AND their enemy, will be victories. We know NEITHER ourselves nor our enemies, most of them of our own making. There are reasons for this, but the most important reason lies with our own failing as a public willing to demand the public interest in lieu of special interests.
No one need fear Chomsky, who loves America as much as I do. We need to fear only our inertia as disciplining those who have committed high crimes and misdemeanors, relying on our apathy. The list is long.
Great Book, NOT a Substitute for the Five Day Course
June 14, 2007
Michael Carr
This is one of four weather books I recommend, the other three are hot-linked below. It is a truly great book with both white space and color images, easy to read font, and a sensible easy to understand roadmap for integrating satellite imagery, upper air (500 milibar) and surface forecasts and sea state charts.
After I finished the five day course in Advanced Meterology, I created a short guide for myself that I could share with others, and this book was very helpful as a reference to complement the binder that I received with the course.
I buy books in pairs or triples, but in the case of weather, both in preparation for the 35-hour Advanced Meterology Course and as a reference library after the fact, I bought four, the other three hot-linked below.
Weather extremes are getting worse, NOAA is under-funded and has trouble getting one 96 hour forecast out, the bottom line is that we are largely on our own where the boat meets the wave offshore.
This book is packed with more detail, including very specific guidance on what to do in relation to specific situations, and absolutely great multiple choice quesitons at the end of each chapter.
This is “the” textbook, but I don't believe in just one book, so I like all four together.
Our Era's Tom Paine on Common Sense, June 12, 2007
Ted Gup
As one of those who testified to the Moynihan Commission on Secrecy, and to earlier Presidential Commissions of excessive government classification, I consider this book to be a treasure. The reviewer that defends government secrecy to protect “sources and methods” knows nothing of them. I was a spy, I helped steal codebooks and program imagery satellites, and I stood up the Marine Corps Intelligence Command.
The author has rendered the Republic an extraordinary service, and from somewhere in heaven Daniel Patrick Moynihan is smiling upon this superb public service.
The author opens the book with an extraordinary snapshot of a single day, Thursday, February 2, 2006, and a stunning array of secret sessions and practices spanning the entire Nation and all of its domains (academic, business, government, law enforcement, religious).
This is a book of case studies, and a book with a constant theme that we must all note: secrecy breeds contempt and distrust, and secrecy blocks the collective intelligence of the people from playing a role in self-governance.
The author excels at discussion not just excessive national security secrecy, but how secrecy is now pervasive, from agricultural contamination and recalls being concealed from the public, to energy policy (Dick Cheney is the first in history to destroy all records of all his guests).
The author reminds us that Thomas Jefferson stated that “Information is the currency of democracy,” and in all that he writes, he shows how secrecy is pathologically altering the relationship between the government and the governed, as well as between all forms of organization and their clients, members, or adherents.
From the security clearance backlog to CIA abuses against its own employees to enlisted men being forbidden to discuss severe deficiencies in their body armor to the concealment of government negligence resulting in wrongful death to the concealment of corporate product deficiencies that kill to the silencing of valid *internal* critics of policies of torture and rendition to the obsessive *reclassification* of information long declassified, the author has written the definitive treatise on how the US Government and all elements of the US (academia, commerce) etc. have forsaken the principles and values of our Founding Fathers.
The author states that secrecy produces errors in judgment and frees government from the fear of being contradicted by the facts.
I admire this book, and this author, very much. This is a book that every citizen voter and citizen consumer should read. We must eradicate 90% of the secrecy in America, and we must redirect 75% of both the military and the intelligence budgets toward waging peace and open source intelligence, including free online and on demand education in 183 languages.
I can best support this author and this book by offering several quotes that he missed and that completely support his presentation:
Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories. … Our experience has shown us that in the general framework of daily struggle, this battle against ourselves, this struggle against our own weaknesses … is the most difficult of all. [0}
Daniel Ellsberg speaking to Henry Kissinger:
The danger is, you'll become like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours” [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information]. [1]
Rodney McDaniel speaking at Harvard University:
Everybody who's a real practitioner, and I'm sure you're not all naïve in this regard, realizes that there are two uses to which security classification is put: the legitimate desire to protect secrets, and the protection of bureaucratic turf. As a practitioner of the real world, it's about 90 bureaucratic turf; 10 legitimate protection of secrets as far as I am concerned. [2]
Ted Shackley in his Memoirs:
In short, the collapse of the communist system in Central Europe has created a new situation for intelligence collectors. I estimate, based in part on my commercial discussions since 1990 in East Germany, Poland, Albania, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, that 80 percent of what is on any intelligence agency's wish list for this area as of 1991 is now available overtly. [3]
General Tony Zinni speaking to a senior national security manager:
80% of what I needed to know as CINCENT I got from open sources rather than classified reporting. And within the remaining 20%, if I knew what to look for, I found another 16%. At the end of it all, classified intelligence provided me, at best, with 4% of my command knowledge. [4]
Robert Steele, in varied speeches and publications:
Do not send a spy where a schoolboy can go.
The problem with spies is they only know secrets.
OSINT changes the rules of the game by making everyone in the audience a player with a legitimate right to collect, produce, and consume public intelligence.
Today, U.S. “intelligence” is upside down and inside out. It is upside down because it relies on satellites in outer space rather than human eyes on the ground. It is inside out because it tries to divine intelligence unilaterally, without first asking anyone else what information they might provide. [5]
Footnotes:
[0] Received in email from an associate.
[1] Daniel Ellsberg, SECRETS: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (Viking, 2002).
[2] Rodney McDaniel, then Executive Secretary of the National Security Council, to a Harvard University seminar, as cited in Thomas P. Croakley (ed), C3I: Issues of Command and Control (National Defense University, 1991). Page 68.
[3] Ted Shackley, SPYMASTER: My Life in the CIA (Potomac, 2006). Page 282
[4] General Tony Zinni, USMC (Ret.), former Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Central Command (CINCCENT), as recounted to the author on 4 April 2006.
[5] Forbes.com, within “Blank Slate,” as Edited By David M. Ewalt and Michael Noer and published 04-18-06.
