The Sixth Estate

As I was combing through the latest pile of WikiLeaks cables, the batch including inflammatory material contributing to the potential revolution now underway in Egypt, I was struck by this sentence in a secret briefing to General Norman Schwarz in 2009:

President Mubarak and military leaders view our military assistance program as the cornerstone of our mil-mil relationship and consider the USD 1.3 billion in annual FMF (Foreign Military Financing) as “untouchable compensation” for making and maintaining peace with Israel. The tangible benefits to our mil-mil relationship are clear: Egypt remains at peace with Israel, and the U.S. military enjoys priority access to the Suez Canal and Egyptian airspace… Egypt remains a key U.S. ally…

One way to demonstrate Egypt’s continued strategic importance is through shifting more FMF funding to address asymmetric threats like terrorism and improving border security… The EAF [Egyptian Air Force]… [is] prepar[ing] to purchase 24 F-16 aircraft that will require a costly retrofit with less-advanced weapons systems… [Some] systems are either not releasable to any country or denied for political reasons, mainly due to concerns regarding Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge.

This hogwash easily illustrates the inconsistency of American policy short of one key goal: “buying” the political support of foreign governments by bribing their militaries.

On the one hand, Egypt is a “key ally.” On the other, the U.S. is deliberately fobbing off second-rate technology — and, notice, charging them to downgrade it further — on the principle that Israel must always have a stronger military. (Israel is also a major recipient of military aid.) On the one hand, the military funding is supposed to be used to push Egypt into counterterrorism. On the other, they’re selling them F-16 fighter jets, which don’t really have any role in counterterrorism. Of course, there is an obvious benefit for General Dynamics, the American company that manufactures the F-16.

So the Americans get a reliable ally, and the recipient military gets a ton of cash which it can use on American planes, or suppressing protests, or whatever.

One of the most phenomenal aspects of the stock market mayhem of the past two years was the discovery that the American Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is one of the most inept law enforcement organizations in the country. There have still been virtually no prosecutions or lawsuits, despite evidence of massive fraud. Despite large amounts of evidence being presented to them by concerned outsiders, the largest fraud in history, that of Bernie Madoff, was similarly missed.

The SEC possesses an outside oversight body, an Inspector-General, who monitors the organization, identifies wrongdoing, and makes recommendations for improvements. Most of the reports are public and unclassified, and most of them even (used to) appear on the organization’s website. Curiously, however, not all of them do. In fact, some of them were even removed from the website, according to the Project on Government Oversight (POGO).

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Cryptome has just published some interesting material on how senior officials in the Gerald R. Ford administration confronted demands by the Church Committee to investigate the world of secret intelligence during the mid-1970s. The documents show how both presidents as well as senior administration officials, such as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (winner of a Nobel Peace Prize), plotted to hold back every possible detail of their frequently illegal activities. The Church Committee was formed in response to leaks of blatantly illegal and even criminal activities by the CIA, as well as in the wake of the Watergate scandal which brought down Nixon. There are some disturbing parallels to the current response to the WikiLeaks affair.

On February 20, Kissinger met with defense secretary James Schlesinger, CIA director William Colby, and assorted underlings to consider the problems confronting the administration. Interestingly, Kissinger invoked McCarthyism, as though red-baiting and the public’s right to know are pretty much the same thing: (more…)

A new report in the New York Times illustrates both the potential and the pitfalls (but mostly the latter) of espionage now being conducted for U.S. government interests, by private organizations instead of by government agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency. It seems that former CIA officer Duane Clarridge has set himself up in California as the head of what the Times calls a “private CIA,” known as the Eclipse Group. The Eclipse Group seems to be particularly active in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

At its height, Clarridge’s private espionage circle had hundreds of agents in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many of them were targeting the Taliban and the Pakistani government; Clarridge believes that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence actually apprehended Taliban leader Mullah Omar some time ago and hasn’t yet told the Americans. However, he has also targeted what he believes are corrupt Afghan government officials, including Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of president Hamid Karzai. Ahmed Karzai is deeply involved in the country’s massive heroin trade, but Clarridge suspects he enjoys secret American protection because he is a CIA source. (more…)

This week, Sayfildin Tahir Sharif of Edmonton, AB, was brought to court and told he was facing extradition to the United States to face charges of terrorism. American prosecutors allege that Sharif supported a Tunisian terrorist network coordinating bombings in Iraq by counseling young men preparing to carry out suicide bombings, at least two of which (say the Americans) actually occurred. The Canadian press has jumped on the case over the past day or so — see, for instance, the Montreal Gazette, Winnipeg Free Press, Vancouver Sun, and CTV News.

The evidence seems more or less persuasive. Something else really worries me about this case, though: why aren’t we charging him?

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Bloomberg and other media have reported that one of WikiLeaks’s sources may have been peer-to-peer networks. “Evidence” for this assertion comes from a private Internet intelligence company in Pennsylvania, Tiversa. Bloomberg also assembled a range of supportive quotes from supposed media advocacy organizations in Washington, all of whom sagely agree that this proves evidence of wrongdoing by WikiLeaks. The implication seems be that this is further evidence for an eventual criminal case against WikiLeaks and its high-profile director, Julian Assange.

It’s a sad, sorry spectacle. It proves exactly why WikiLeaks is so important — and exactly why the corporate media is increasingly making itself irrelevant, with sad consequences for our democracy.

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One of the greatest ironies of some of the heavy-handed government responses to WikiLeaks is, as a new Secrecy News policy release proves, that it is illegal for people with security clearances to access leaked classified documents, but legal for people without security clearances. To this end, people who work for the military are not allowed to read WikiLeaks. The ironies of bureaucracy strike yet again.

The problem, at its heart, is a legal one. People in certain positions in government are subject to legal restrictions on what they are allowed to access or communicate (I won’t say can access or communicate, because that confuses legal threat with personal will, which is how we get into these sorts of paradoxes in the first place). That’s true even after information is leaked, because formally even leaked information is still classified. A document can be “Secret,” or even “Top Secret,” without actually being a secret.

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In virtually every spy movie, there’s always a big “reveal” moment, either close to the beginning or at the point where the uneducated protagonist is led into the inner sanctum, and then — Voila! Fancy computers! Panel upon panel of important-looking information! Suits bustling everywhere!

Sometimes that’s true, I suppose, but one of the necessary complications of having to travel and work undercover is that sometimes you really do have to work in conditions more or less decrepit enough to avoid attracting attention. That’s what happened to the unnamed CIA spy ship “LCFANGLED” (that’s the code name, not the ship name), in 1953. LCFANGLED left Panama in 1953 under command of Laurence Sillence, and headed toward target “Identity 1″ — probably something related to Guatemala, since a related debriefing is coded “PBFORTUNE” after the CIA covert operation there. No details about the LCFANGLED are provided, but it is subsequently stated that the ship cannot be boarded or impounded by any other country because of “the illegality of both vessel and crew.”

Then things went wrong:

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After the latest major leak from WikiLeaks, everyone seemed very interested in the American government’s blatant overreaction, which even featured politicians demanding that Julian Assange be either detained or summarily executed. An aspect that most of the media, even the non-American media, seems to have missed is just why so many other governments were willing to go along with Washington’s immediate and unsuccessful attempt to censor the Internet and dig up dirt on Assange.

Of course the real story wasn’t (usually) about the American government, but about how other governments (including democratically elected ones) lied to their own publics about the extent to which they were secretly collaborating with the American government. A cable that’s getting plenty of press this week noted, for instance, that Turkey allowed the U.S. to use its Incirlik airbase for torture flights, which the Turkish government previously denied. The media has not been much concerned with another aspect of that cable: the role of American military and diplomatic officials in lobbying foreign governments on behalf of American defense contractors.

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The Central Intelligence Agency’s increasingly desperate schemes to assassinate or at least embarrass Castro, from exploding cigars and Mafia hitmen to beard depilatories, are legend. What is less well-known are some of the same agency’s other various schemes to attack Castro, one of which is detailed by Jack Pfeiffer in his secret history of the Bay of Pigs (a copy of which was obtained by a Florida researcher).

This one isn’t as serious (or illegal) as the Pentagon’s subsequent NORTHWOODS plan, which proposed (among other things) what amounted to a campaign of domestic terrorism within the U.S. The CIA considered and rejected such plans as doctoring photos of Cuban aircraft to make it look as though the Castro government was painting them in U.S. Air Force colours (presumably for some nefarious purpose), or sending a “Billy Graham type” speaker around Latin America in a white plane to warn people of the dangers of revolutionary movements in their own countries.

Then, it came across something far better. This too was rejected by the chief mucky-mucks, but it still deserves to be reproduced in full as an indication of CIA thinking:

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