Truth
and Lives vs. Career and Fame
As President Trump considers sending more troops
to Afghanistan, it’s worth recalling the modern
U.S. dynamic of politicians and generals making
misguided judgments about war, writes ex-CIA
analyst Ray McGovern.
By Ray McGovern
August 21,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Fifty years ago, I could have tried to stop
the Vietnam War, but lacked the courage. On Aug.
20, 1967, we at CIA received a cable from Saigon
containing documentary proof that the U.S.
commander, Gen. William Westmoreland, and his
deputy, Gen. Creighton Abrams, were lying about
their “success” in fighting the Vietnamese
Communists. I live with regret that I did not
blow the whistle on that when I could have.
(I wrote about this two years ago: “The
Lasting Pain from Vietnam Silence,”
republished below.)
Why
raise this now? Because President Donald Trump
has surrounded himself with starry-eyed generals
(or generals with their eyes focused on their
careers). And he seems to have little inkling
that they got their multiple stars under a
system where the Army motto “Duty, Honor,
Country” can now be considered as “quaint” and
“obsolete” as the Bush-Cheney administration
deemed the Geneva Conventions.
All too
often, the number of ribbons and merit badges
festooned on the breasts of U.S. generals these
days (think of the be-medaled Gen. David
Petraeus, for example) is in direct proportion
to the lies they have told in saluting smartly
and abetting the unrealistic expectations of
their political masters (and thus winning yet
another star).
In my
apologia that follows, the concentration is on
the crimes of Westmoreland and the generations
of careerist generals who aped him. There is not
enough space to describe (or even list) those
sycophantic officers here.
There
are, sadly, far fewer senior officers who were
exceptions, who put the true interests of the
country ahead of their own careers. The list of
general officers with integrity – the extreme
exceptions to the rule – is even shorter. Only
three spring immediately to mind: two generals
and one admiral, all three of them cashiered for
doing their job with honesty. What they
experienced was instructive and remains so to
this day.
1-On
February 25, 2003, three weeks before the attack
on Iraq, Army Chief of Staff Eric
Shinseki warned the Senate Armed
Services Committee that post-war Iraq would
require “something on the order of several
hundred thousand soldiers.” He was immediately
ridiculed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, for having
exaggerated the requirement. Shinseki retired a
few months later.
2-Army General David McKiernan
was cut from the same cloth. When President
Barack Obama took office, McKiernan was running
the war in Afghanistan. Even before Obama’s
election, he had expressed himself openly and
strongly against applying the benighted
Iraq-style “surge” of forces to Afghanistan,
emphasizing that Afghanistan is “a far more
complex environment than I ever found in Iraq,”
where he had led U.S. ground forces.
“The
word I don’t use for Afghanistan is ‘surge,’”
McKiernan told a news conference on Oct. 1,
2008. He warned that a large, sustained military
buildup would be necessary to achieve any
meaningful success. Worse still for the
Washington Establishment, McKiernan added a
stunning “no-no” – he said to achieve anything
approaching a satisfactory outcome would take a
decade, perhaps 14 years. Imagine!
For his
political bosses, that cautionary realism was
too much. On May 11, 2009, the Defense Secretary
whom Obama’s predecessor bequeathed to him,
Robert Gates, sacked McKiernan, who had been in
command less than a year. Gates replaced him
with the swashbuckling Gen. Stanley McChrystal,
a protégé of Gen. (and later CIA Director) David
Petraeus.
Now, more than eight years later – with the
American death toll almost quadrupled since the
start of the Obama administration (now
exceeding 2,400),
with a vastly greater death toll among Afghan
civilians and with the U.S. military position
even more precarious – President Trump is
receiving advice to dispatch more U.S. troops.
3-Admiral William J. (“Fox”)
Fallon, one of
the last Vietnam War veterans on active duty
late into George W. Bush’s administration, took
over as chief of the Central Command on March
16, 2007. Fallon had already come under heavy
criticism from the neoconservative American
Enterprise Institute for not being hawkish
enough.
Fallon
had also been confronting Vice President Dick
Cheney’s desire to commit U.S. forces to another
Mideast war, with Iran. As Fallon was preparing
to take responsibility for U.S. forces in the
region, he declared that a war with Iran “isn’t
going to happen on my watch,” according to
retired Army Col. Patrick Lang who told the
Washington Post.
Fallon’s lack of patience with yes-men turned
out to be yet another bureaucratic black mark
against him. Several sources have reported that
Fallon was sickened by David Petraeus’s earlier,
unctuous pandering to ingratiate himself with
Fallon, his superior (for all-too-short a
time). Fallon is said to have been so turned off
by all the accolades in a flowery introduction
given him by Petraeus that he called him to his
face “an ass-kissing little chicken-shit,”
adding, “I hate people like that.”
Fallon
lasted not quite a full year. On March 11, 2008,
Gates announced the resignation of Fallon as
CENTCOM Commander, but Fallon’s resistance to a
war on Iran bought enough time for the U.S.
intelligence community to reach a consensus that
Iran had stopped work on a nuclear bomb years
earlier, thus removing President Bush’s intended
excuse for going to war.
A
Troubling Message
Sadly, however, the message to aspiring military
commanders from this history is that there is
little personal gain in doing what’s best for
the American people and the world. The
promotions and the prestige normally go to the
careerists who bend to the self-aggrandizing
realities of Official Washington. They are the
ones who typically become esteemed “wise men,”
the likes of Gen. Colin Powell, who went with
the political winds (from
his days as a young officer in Vietnam
through his tenure as Secretary of State).
Someone needs to tell President Trump what
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
told President
George W. Bush in a memorandum for the President
on February 5, 2003, immediately following
Powell’s deceptive testimony urging the United
Nations’ Security Council to support an invasion
of Iraq. What we said then seems just as urgent
now:
“[A]fter watching Secretary Powell today, we are
convinced that you would be well served if you
widened the discussion beyond … the circle of
those advisers clearly bent on a war for which
we see no compelling reason and from which we
believe the unintended consequences are likely
to be catastrophic.”
And on
the chance that President Trump remains
tone-deaf to such advice, let me appeal to the
consciences of those within the system who are
privy to the kind of consequential deceit that
has become endemic to the U.S. government. It is
time to blow the whistle – now.
Take it
from one who lives with regret from choosing not
to step forward when it might have made a
difference. Take it from Pentagon Papers
truth-teller Daniel Ellsberg who often expresses
regret that he did not speak out sooner.
Take it
from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a passage
ironically cited often by President Obama: “We
are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is
today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency
of now … there is such a thing
as being too late.”
[Below
is McGovern’s article from May 1, 2015]
The
Lasting Pain from Vietnam Silence
Exclusive:
Many reflections on America’s final days in
Vietnam miss the point, pondering whether the
war could have been won or lamenting the fate of
U.S. collaborators left behind. The bigger
questions are why did the U.S. go to war and why
wasn’t the bloodletting stopped sooner, as
ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern reflects.
By Ray
McGovern
Ecclesiastes
says there is a time to be silent and a time to
speak. The fortieth anniversary of the ugly end
of the U.S. adventure in Vietnam is a time to
speak and especially of the squandered
opportunities that existed earlier in the war to
blow the whistle and stop the killing.
While
my friend Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon
Papers in 1971 eventually helped to end the war,
Ellsberg is the first to admit that he waited
too long to reveal the unconscionable deceit
that brought death and injury to millions.
I
regret that, at first out of naiveté and then
cowardice, I waited even longer until my own
truth-telling no longer really mattered for the
bloodshed in Vietnam. My hope is that there may
be a chance this reminiscence might matter now
if only as a painful example of what I could and
should have done, had I the courage back then.
Opportunities to blow the whistle in time
now confront a new generation of intelligence
analysts whether they work on Iraq, Syria,
Afghanistan, ISIS or Iran.
Incidentally, on Iran, there was a very positive
example last decade: courageous analysts led by
intrepid (and bureaucratically skilled) former
Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence
Thomas Fingar showed that honesty can still
prevail within the system, even when truth is
highly unwelcome.
The
unanimous intelligence community conclusion of a
National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 that Iran
had stopped working on a nuclear weapon four
years earlier played a huge role in thwarting
plans by President George W. Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney to attack Iran in 2008,
their last year in office. Bush says so in his
memoir; and, on that one point, we can believe
him.
After a
half-century of watching such things closely,
this is the only time in my experience that the
key judgment of an NIE helped prevent a
catastrophic, unwinnable war. Sadly, judging
from the amateurism now prevailing in
Washington’s opaque policymaking circles, it
seems clear that the White House pays little
heed to those intelligence officers still trying
to speak truth to power.
For
them I have a suggestion: Don’t just wring your
hands, with an “I did everything I could to get
the truth out.” Chances are you have not
done all you can. Ponder the stakes the lives
ended too early; the bodies and minds damaged
forever; the hatred engendered against the
United States; and the long-term harm to U.S.
national interests and think about blowing the
whistle publicly to prevent unnecessary carnage
and alienation.
I
certainly wish I had done so about what I
learned of the unconscionable betrayal by senior
military and intelligence officers regarding
Vietnam. More recently, I know that several of
you intelligence analysts with a conscience wish
you had blown the whistle on the fraud
“justifying” war on Iraq. Spreading some truth
around is precisely what you need to do now on
Syria, Iraq, Ukraine and the “war on terror,”
for example.
I
thought that by describing my own experience
negative as it is and the remorse I continue to
live with, I might assist those of you now
pondering whether to step up to the plate and
blow the whistle now, before it is again too
late. So below is an article that I might call
“Vietnam and Me.”
My hope
is to spare you the remorse of having to write,
a decade or two from now, your own “Ukraine and
Me” or “Syria and Me” or “Iraq and Me” or “Libya
and Me” or “The War on Terror and Me.” My
article, from 2010, was entitled “How Truth Can
Save Lives” and it began:
If
independent-minded Web sites, like WikiLeaks or,
say, Consortiumnews.com, existed 43 years ago, I
might have risen to the occasion and helped save
the lives of some 25,000 U.S. soldiers, and a
million Vietnamese, by exposing the lies
contained in just one SECRET/EYES ONLY cable
from Saigon.
I need
to speak out now because I have been sickened
watching the herculean effort by Official
Washington and our Fawning Corporate Media (FCM)
to divert attention from the violence and deceit
in Afghanistan, reflected in thousands of U.S.
Army documents, by shooting the messenger(s),
WikiLeaks and Pvt. Bradley Manning.
After
all the indiscriminate death and destruction
from nearly nine years of war, the hypocrisy is
all too transparent when WikiLeaks and suspected
leaker Manning are accused of risking lives by
exposing too much truth. Besides, I still have a
guilty conscience for what I chose NOT to do in
exposing facts about the Vietnam War that might
have saved lives.
The
sad-but-true story recounted below is offered in
the hope that those in similar circumstances
today might show more courage than I was able to
muster in 1967, and take full advantage of the
incredible advancements in technology since
then.
Many of
my Junior Officer Trainee Program colleagues at
CIA came to Washington in the early Sixties
inspired by President John Kennedy’s Inaugural
speech in which he asked us to ask ourselves
what we might do for our country. (Sounds corny
nowadays, I suppose; I guess I’ll just have to
ask you to take it on faith. It may not have
been Camelot exactly, but the spirit and
ambience were fresh, and good.)
Among
those who found Kennedy’s summons compelling was
Sam Adams, a young former naval officer out of
Harvard College. After the Navy, Sam tried
Harvard Law School, but found it boring.
Instead, he decided to go to Washington, join
the CIA as an officer trainee, and do something
more adventurous. He got more than his share of
adventure.
Sam was
one of the brightest and most dedicated among
us. Quite early in his career, he acquired a
very lively and important account, that of
assessing Vietnamese Communist strength early in
the war. He took to the task with uncommon
resourcefulness and quickly proved himself the
consummate analyst.
Relying
largely on captured documents, buttressed by
reporting from all manner of other sources,
Adams concluded in 1967 that there were twice as
many Communists (about 600,000) under arms in
South Vietnam as the U.S. military there would
admit.
Dissembling in Saigon
Visiting Saigon during 1967, Adams learned from
Army analysts that their commanding general,
William Westmoreland, had placed an artificial
cap on the official Army count rather than risk
questions regarding “progress” in the war (sound
familiar?).
It was
a clash of cultures; with Army intelligence
analysts saluting generals following politically
dictated orders, and Sam Adams aghast at the
dishonesty, consequential dishonesty.
From time to time I would have lunch with Sam
and learn of the formidable opposition he
encountered in trying to get out the truth.
Commiserating with Sam over lunch one day in
late August 1967, I asked what could possibly be
Gen. Westmoreland’s incentive to make the enemy
strength appear to be half what it actually was.
Sam gave me the answer he had from the horse’s
mouth in Saigon.
Adams told
me that in a cable dated Aug. 20, 1967,
Westmoreland’s deputy, Gen. Creighton Abrams,
set forth the rationale for the deception.
Abrams wrote that the new, higher numbers
(reflecting Sam’s count, which was supported by
all intelligence agencies except Army
intelligence, which reflected the “command
position”) “were in sharp contrast to the
current overall strength figure of about 299,000
given to the press.”
Abrams
emphasized, “We have been projecting an image of
success over recent months” and cautioned that
if the higher figures became public, “all
available caveats and explanations will not
prevent the press from drawing an erroneous and
gloomy conclusion.”
No
further proof was needed that the most senior
U.S. Army commanders were lying, so that they
could continue to feign “progress” in the war.
Equally unfortunate, the crassness and
callousness of Abrams’s cable notwithstanding,
it had become increasingly clear that rather
than stand up for Sam, his superiors would
probably acquiesce in the Army’s bogus figures.
Sadly, that’s what they did.
CIA
Director Richard Helms, who saw his primary duty
quite narrowly as “protecting” the agency, set
the tone. He told subordinates that he could not
discharge that duty if he let the agency get
involved in a heated argument with the U.S. Army
on such a key issue in wartime.
This
cut across the grain of what we had been led to
believe was the prime duty of CIA analysts, to
speak truth to power without fear or favor. And
our experience thus far had shown both of us
that this ethos amounted to much more than just
slogans. We had, so far, been able to “tell it
like it is.”
After
lunch with Sam, for the first time ever, I had
no appetite for dessert. Sam and I had not come
to Washington to “protect the agency.” And,
having served in Vietnam, Sam knew first hand
that thousands upon thousands were being killed
in a feckless war.
What to
Do?
I have
an all-too-distinct memory of a long silence
over coffee, as each of us ruminated on what
might be done. I recall thinking to myself;
someone should take the Abrams cable down to the
New York Times (at the time an
independent-minded newspaper).
Clearly, the only reason for the cable’s
SECRET/EYES ONLY classification was to hide
deliberate deception of our most senior generals
regarding “progress” in the war and deprive the
American people of the chance to know the truth.
Going
to the press was, of course, antithetical to the
culture of secrecy in which we had been trained.
Besides, you would likely be caught at your next
polygraph examination. Better not to stick your
neck out.
I
pondered all this in the days after that lunch
with Adams. And I succeeded in coming up with a
slew of reasons why I ought to keep silent: a
mortgage; a plum overseas assignment for which I
was in the final stages of language training;
and, not least, the analytic work, important,
exciting work on which Sam and I thrived.
Better
to keep quiet for now, grow in gravitas, and
live on to slay other dragons. Right?
One
can, I suppose, always find excuses for not
sticking one’s neck out. The neck, after all, is
a convenient connection between head and torso,
albeit the “neck” that was the focus of my
concern was a figurative one, suggesting
possible loss of career, money and status not
the literal “necks” of both Americans and
Vietnamese that were on the line daily in the
war.
But if
there is nothing for which you would risk your
career “neck” like, say, saving the lives of
soldiers and civilians in a war zone your “neck”
has become your idol, and your career is not
worthy of that. I now regret giving such worship
to my own neck. Not only did I fail the neck
test. I had not thought things through very
rigorously from a moral point of view.
Promises
to Keep?
As a
condition of employment, I had signed a promise
not to divulge classified information so as not
to endanger sources, methods or national
security. Promises are important, and one should
not lightly violate them. Plus, there are
legitimate reasons for protecting some secrets.
But were any of those legitimate concerns the
real reasons why Abrams’s cable was stamped
SECRET/EYES ONLY? I think not.
It is
not good to operate in a moral vacuum, oblivious
to the reality that there exists a hierarchy of
values and that circumstances often determine
the morality of a course of action. How does a
written promise to keep secret everything with a
classified stamp on it square with one’s moral
responsibility to stop a war based on lies? Does
stopping a misbegotten war not supersede a
secrecy promise?
Ethicists use the words “supervening value” for
this; the concept makes sense to me. And is
there yet another value? As an Army officer, I
had taken a solemn oath to protect and defend
the Constitution of the United States from all
enemies, foreign and domestic.
How did
the lying by the Army command in Saigon fit in
with that? Were/are generals exempt? Should we
not call them out when we learn of deliberate
deception that subverts the democratic process?
Can the American people make good decisions if
they are lied to?
Would I
have helped stop unnecessary killing by giving
the New York Times the
not-really-secret, SECRET/EYES ONLY cable from
Gen. Abrams? We’ll never know, will we? And I
live with that. I could not take the easy way
out, saying Let Sam Do It. Because I knew he
wouldn’t.
Sam
chose to go through the established grievance
channels and got the royal run-around, even
after the Communist countrywide offensive at Tet
in January-February 1968 proved beyond any doubt
that his count of Communist forces was correct.
When
the Tet offensive began, as a way of keeping his
sanity, Adams drafted a caustic cable to Saigon
saying, “It is something of an anomaly to be
taking so much punishment from Communist
soldiers whose existence is not officially
acknowledged.” But he did not think the
situation at all funny.
Dan
Ellsberg Steps In
Sam
kept playing by the rules, but it happened that
unbeknown to Sam Dan Ellsberg gave Sam’s figures
on enemy strength to the New York Times,
which published them on March 19, 1968. Dan had
learned that President Lyndon Johnson was about
to bow to Pentagon pressure to widen the war
into Cambodia, Laos and up to the Chinese border
perhaps even beyond.
Later,
it became clear that his timely leak together
with another unauthorized disclosure to the
Times that the Pentagon had requested
206,000 more troops prevented a wider war. On
March 25, Johnson complained to a small
gathering, “The leaks to the New York Times
hurt us. We have no support for the war. I would
have given Westy the 206,000 men.”
Ellsberg also copied the Pentagon Papers the
7,000-page top-secret history of U.S.
decision-making on Vietnam from 1945 to 1967
and, in 1971, he gave copies to the New York
Times, Washington Post and other
news organizations.
In the
years since, Ellsberg has had difficulty shaking
off the thought that, had he released the
Pentagon Papers sooner, the war might have ended
years earlier with untold lives saved. Ellsberg
has put it this way: “Like so many others, I put
personal loyalty to the president above all else
above loyalty to the Constitution and above
obligation to the law, to truth, to Americans,
and to humankind. I was wrong.”
And so
was I wrong in not asking Sam for a copy of that
cable from Gen. Abrams. Sam, too, eventually had
strong regrets. Sam had continued to pursue the
matter within CIA, until he learned that Dan
Ellsberg was on trial in 1973 for releasing the
Pentagon Papers and was being accused of
endangering national security by revealing
figures on enemy strength.
Which
figures? The same old faked numbers from 1967!
“Imagine,” said Adams, “hanging a man for
leaking faked numbers,” as he hustled off to
testify on Dan’s behalf. (The case against
Ellsberg was ultimately thrown out of court
because of prosecutorial abuses committed by the
Nixon administration.)
After
the war drew down, Adams was tormented by the
thought that, had he not let himself be diddled
by the system, the entire left half of the
Vietnam Memorial wall would not be there. There
would have been no new names to chisel into such
a wall.
Sam
Adams died prematurely at age 55 with nagging
remorse that he had not done enough.
In a
letter appearing in the (then
independent-minded) New York Times on
Oct. 18, 1975, John T. Moore, a CIA analyst who
worked in Saigon and the Pentagon from 1965 to
1970, confirmed Adams’s story after Sam told it
in detail in the May 1975 issue of Harper’s
magazine.
Moore
wrote: “My only regret is that I did not have
Sam’s courage. The record is clear. It speaks of
misfeasance, nonfeasance and malfeasance, of
outright dishonesty and professional cowardice.
“It
reflects an intelligence community captured by
an aging bureaucracy, which too often placed
institutional self-interest or personal
advancement before the national interest. It is
a page of shame in the history of American
intelligence.”
Tanks But
No Thanks, Abrams
What
about Gen. Creighton Abrams? Not every general
gets the Army’s main battle tank named after
him. The honor, though, came not from his
service in Vietnam, but rather from his courage
in the early day of his military career, leading
his tanks through German lines to relieve
Bastogne during World War II’s Battle of the
Bulge. Gen. George Patton praised Abrams as the
only tank commander he considered his equal.
As
things turned out, sadly, 23 years later Abrams
became a poster child for old soldiers who, as
Gen. Douglas McArthur suggested, should “just
fade away,” rather than hang on too long after
their great military accomplishments.
In May
1967, Abrams was picked to be Westmoreland’s
deputy in Vietnam and succeeded him a year
later. But Abrams could not succeed in the war,
no matter how effectively “an image of success”
his subordinates projected for the media. The
“erroneous and gloomy conclusions of the press”
that Abrams had tried so hard to head off proved
all too accurate.
Ironically, when reality hit home, it fell to
Abrams to cut back U.S. forces in Vietnam from a
peak of 543,000 in early 1969 to 49,000 in June
1972, almost five years after Abrams’s
progress-defending cable from Saigon. By 1972,
some 58,000 U.S. troops, not to mention two to
three million Vietnamese, had been killed.
Both
Westmoreland and Abrams had reasonably good
reputations when they started out, but not so
much when they finished.
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And
Petraeus?
Comparisons can be invidious, but Gen. David
Petraeus is another Army commander who has wowed
Congress with his ribbons, medals and merit
badges. A pity he was not born early enough to
have served in Vietnam where he might have
learned some real-life hard lessons about the
limitations of counterinsurgency theories.
Moreover, it appears that no one took the
trouble to tell him that in the early Sixties we
young infantry officers already had plenty of
counterinsurgency manuals to study at Fort Bragg
and Fort Benning. There are many things one
cannot learn from reading or writing manuals, as
many of my Army colleagues learned too late in
the jungles and mountains of South Vietnam.
Unless
one is to believe, contrary to all indications,
that Petraeus is not all that bright, one has to
assume he knows that the Afghanistan expedition
is a folly beyond repair. So far, though, he has
chosen the approach taken by Gen. Abrams in his
August 1967 cable from Saigon. That is precisely
why the ground-truth of the documents released
by WikiLeaks is so important.
Whistleblowers Galore
And it’s not just the WikiLeaks documents that
have caused consternation inside the U.S.
government. Investigators reportedly are
rigorously pursuing the source that provided the
New York Times with the texts of two
cables (of 6 and 9 November 2009) from
Ambassador Eikenberry in Kabul. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama
Ignores Key Afghan Warning.”]
To its
credit, even today’s far-less independent
New York Times published a major story
based on the information in those cables, while
President Barack Obama was still trying to
figure out what to do about Afghanistan. Later
the Times posted the entire texts of
the cables, which were classified Top Secret and
NODIS (meaning “no dissemination” to anyone but
the most senior officials to whom the documents
were addressed).
The
cables conveyed Eikenberry’s experienced, cogent
views on the foolishness of the policy in place
and, implicitly, of any eventual decision to
double down on the Afghan War. (That, of course,
is pretty much what the President ended up
doing.) Eikenberry provided chapter and verse to
explain why, as he put it, “I cannot support
[the Defense Department’s] recommendation for an
immediate Presidential decision to deploy
another 40,000 here.”
Such
frank disclosures are anathema to self-serving
bureaucrats and ideologues who would much prefer
depriving the American people of information
that might lead them to question the
government’s benighted policy toward
Afghanistan, for example.
As the
New York Times/Eikenberry cables show,
even today’s FCM (fawning corporate media) may
sometimes display the old spunk of American
journalism and refuse to hide or fudge the
truth, even if the facts might cause the people
to draw “an erroneous and gloomy conclusion,” to
borrow Gen. Abrams’s words of 43 years ago.
Polished
Pentagon Spokesman
Remember “Baghdad Bob,” the irrepressible and
unreliable Iraqi Information Minister at the
time of the U.S.-led invasion? He came to mind
as I watched Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell’s
chaotic, quixotic
press briefing
on Aug. 5 regarding the WikiLeaks exposures. The
briefing was revealing in several respects.
Clear from his prepared statement was what is
bothering the Pentagon the most. Here’s Morrell:
“WikiLeaks’s webpage constitutes a brazen
solicitation to U.S. government officials,
including our military, to break the
law. WikiLeaks’s public assertion that
submitting confidential material to WikiLeaks is
safe, easy and protected by law is materially
false and misleading. The Department of Defense
therefore also demands that WikiLeaks
discontinue any solicitation of this type.”
Rest
assured that the Defense Department will do all
it can to make it unsafe for any government
official to provide WikiLeaks with sensitive
material. But it is contending with a clever
group of hi-tech experts who have built in
precautions to allow information to be submitted
anonymously. That the Pentagon will prevail
anytime soon is far from certain.
Also,
in a ludicrous attempt to close the barn door
after tens of thousands of classified documents
had already escaped, Morrell insisted that
WikiLeaks give back all the documents and
electronic media in its possession. Even the
normally docile Pentagon press corps could not
suppress a collective laugh, irritating the
Pentagon spokesman no end. The impression gained
was one of a Pentagon Gulliver tied down by
terabytes of Lilliputians.
Morrell’s self-righteous appeal to the leaders
of WikiLeaks to “do the right thing” was
accompanied by an explicit threat that,
otherwise, “We shall have to compel them to do
the right thing.” His attempt to assert Pentagon
power in this regard fell flat, given the
realities.
Morrell
also chose the occasion to remind the Pentagon
press corps to behave themselves or face
rejection when applying to be embedded in units
of U.S. armed forces. The correspondents were
shown nodding docilely as Morrell reminded them
that permission for embedding “is by no means a
right. It is a privilege.” The generals giveth
and the generals taketh away.
It was
a moment of arrogance, and press subservience,
that would have sickened Thomas Jefferson or
James Madison, not to mention the courageous war
correspondents who did their duty in Vietnam.
Morrell and the generals can control the
“embeds”; they cannot control the ether. Not
yet, anyway.
And
that was all too apparent beneath the strutting,
preening, and finger waving by the Pentagon’s
fancy silk necktie to the world. Actually, the
opportunities afforded by WikiLeaks and other
Internet Web sites can serve to diminish what
few advantages there are to being in bed
with the Army.
What Would
I Have Done?
Would I
have had the courage to whisk Gen. Abrams’s
cable into the ether in 1967, if WikiLeaks or
other Web sites had been available to provide a
major opportunity to expose the deceit of the
top Army command in Saigon? The Pentagon can
argue that using the Internet this way is not
“safe, easy, and protected by law.” We shall
see.
Meanwhile, this way of exposing information that
people in a democracy should know will continue
to be sorely tempting, and a lot easier than
taking the risk of being photographed lunching
with someone from the New York Times.
From
what I have learned over these past 43 years,
supervening moral values can, and should, trump
lesser promises. Today, I would be determined to
“do the right thing,” if I had access to an
Abrams-like cable from Petraeus in Kabul. And I
believe that Sam Adams, if he were alive today,
would enthusiastically agree that this would be
the morally correct decision.
My article from 2010 ended with a footnote about
the
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in
Intelligence (SAAII),
an organization created by Sam Adams’s former
CIA colleagues and other former intelligence
analysts to hold up his example as a model for
those in intelligence who would aspire to the
courage to speak truth to power.
At the
time there were seven recipients of an annual
award bestowed on those who exemplified Sam
Adam’s courage, persistence and devotion to
truth. Now, there have been 14 recipients:
Coleen Rowley (2002), Katharine Gun (2003),
Sibel Edmonds (2004), Craig Murray (2005), Sam
Provance (2006), Frank Grevil (2007), Larry
Wilkerson (2009), Julian Assange (2010), Thomas
Drake (2011), Jesselyn Radack (2011), Thomas
Fingar (2012), Edward Snowden (2013), Chelsea
Manning (2014), William Binney (2015).
Ray
McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing
arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in
inner-city Washington. He was a close colleague
of Sam Adams; the two began their CIA analyst
careers together during the last months of John
Kennedy’s administration. During the Vietnam
War, McGovern was responsible for analyzing
Soviet policy toward China and Vietnam.
This article was first published by
Consortium News
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