David MacMichaels - July 22nd, 2005

(This concludes the 'unofficial' transcripts I did from McKinney's briefing. Feel free to pass them around for non-commercial use and review. This is Public Domain, AFAIK. David MacMichaels is a former CIA analyst. -r.)

Unofficial transcript of David MacMichael’s statement at the July 22nd Congressional Briefing: The 9/11 Commission Report One Year Later: A Citizens’ Response – Did They Get It Right?

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This business about breaking down the divisions between intelligence, the military and law enforcement occupied a significant portion of the debate that went on after 9/11. And I would say that the 9/11 Commission Report in common with almost every other official or unofficial assessment of the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon emphasized failures in communication and among those, US agencies responsible for warning of threats and responding to them.

Indeed the Report acknowledges serious communication deficiencies within the individual agencies themselves, information not passed through established channels, the prime example of that being the refusal of the Washington FBI office to forward the Minneapolis field office’s request for a FISA search warrant on one of the 9/11 bombers out of fear the request might be denied, making the office in Washington look bad. That’s bureaucracy in action… or inaction.

CIA information on travel by Al Qaeda suspects was not passed on or shared with FBI or INS officials. NORAD procedures on commercial fight path deviations simply were not followed. And (there are) questions about information exchanged between the FAA and controllers in NORAD.

Not surprisingly, the final section of the Report, which is titled “How To Do It” stresses the necessity, in order to defeat or forestall any future terrorist attacks, of reorganizing the country’s national security apparatus, placing it under a central command, giving it more power to survey and to react preventively against real or suspected threats, (no nail files on commercial flights, please), and very significantly, to eliminate the alleged legal or policy legislations that had supposedly prohibited communications between the intelligence agencies, (read CIA), law enforcement (read FBI), and the military forces.

Now, the immediate government reaction, long before the filing of any reports such as that of the 9/11 Commission which we are discussing today, or that of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence of July 9th, 2004, or this year’s Presidential Commission headed by former Senator Robb and Judge Silverman, was to present to an eager Congress, I would say, the so-called P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act which seemingly erased all legal barriers to investigation and prosecution of all possible threats to national security… having said ‘national security’ that is that still legally undefined term introduced into the American vocabulary back in 1947 when the determination to forestall any new Pearl Harbors unified, sort of, the Armed Services and created our first foreign intelligence agency, the CIA.

Now it’s instructive, I think to revisit the debate that went on over the 1947 Act. Both in Congress and nationally. The questions faced were very similar to those we’re discussing today.

“Why had Pearl Harbor happened?”

“Why had the information held, because we had broken the Japanese codes, by the Chief of Naval Operations not been passed to the fleet commanders in Hawaii?”

“Why had those commanders not acted appropriately on the information they did get?”

And the debate on all this still goes on, in any event it was largely accepted that the failure had been systemic, and so the answer was systemic change. Moreover even though we had won the war the menace of the Axis was replaced almost immediately by that of the Soviet Communists and the Cold War era that would define our lives for the next half-century had begun.

Now when… we revisit that debate, many of us here would be surprised I think, to find that the major Congressional opposition to the proposed changes was from traditional Conservative Republicans, many from the Midwest, who remained basically isolationist, and looked askance at the creation of the National Security State, and had particular concerns about something so un-American as a national foreign intelligence service.

Indeed, one of the most formidable opponents of the CIA was J. Edgar Hoover, who feared that the new intelligence agency would take over his turf, as indeed it did in Latin America. It should be noted though, the new law specifically prohibited the CIA from carrying out any domestic intelligence activities, nor having any law enforcement powers. Nevertheless, the opposition was overcome, largely because the then dominant East Coast Republican establishment, symbolized by John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, who were to become respectively Secretary of State and DCIA in the Eisenhower administration, was as internationalist and actively anti-Soviet as the Democratic Party symbolized by Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson… as an aside… Dean Acheson, as he described and elaborated the new Soviet Menace… used the analogy of the rise of Islam in the 8th and 9th century which had threatened Europe, so as we see the Red Menace morph into the Islamic Menace, we see a foreshadowing even there.

Domestically law enforcement under J. Edgar Hoover… led the battle against the internal Red Menace, subversion and espionage, with ample support from Congress, the Smith Act, the House on Un-American Activities Committee and the rise of McCarthyism help us recall the atmosphere of those times… I remind you of this history to make the point, 9/11, as tragic as it was, was not the first time in relatively recent years, that the US has been gripped by fear of surprise attack, or of subversion by some alien ideology whose unscrupulous followers would employ the most unthinkable means against us and our way of life, which for unfathomable reasons they hated and hoped to destroy.

Our response to this, a response embodied in the term ‘national security’ always has included a belief that we have inadequate information, (intelligence, that is), about the enemy, and when, where and how he intends to strike us. Likewise, it has always included a belief that the enemy has planted his agents among us, and therefore domestic law enforcement needs increased powers and resources to survey and monitor suspect citizens, and to prosecute them for actions interpreted as threatening that ‘national security’, even at the expense of traditional liberties.

To a somewhat lesser degree, but not unimportantly, the response usually includes an enhanced role for the military. Either in the often clandestine conduct of domestic intelligence activities, or indirect activities that observers argue the Posse Comitatus laws prohibiting use of the military for domestic law enforcement.

The line between Police and Military grows increasingly blurred, as all one has to do is look at Police SWAT teams, dressed in military field gear, and toting heavy weaponry supplied by the Pentagon, routinely employing military tactics. The symbol for this I guess, is the assault, a dozen or so years ago against the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.

By the same token, the sense of imminent, even if hard to demonstrate threat, has been used over this period to justify so-called covert operations carried out in other countries principally by the CIA, but increasingly in recent years by special units of the Armed Forces.

More and more the figleaf of ‘Plausible Deniability’ employed in such operations has been dropped, as we claim the right to intervene militarily and politically in other countries on grounds of imminent threat to ourselves or others or even, as now, to advance Democracy, the absence of which in some other state we can interpret as a threat itself to our own political system.

Now let me conclude quickly here by emphasizing that for those even slightly familiar with the current intelligence reform proposals, there is a more than vague sense, to use Yogi Berra’s immortal phrase, of “Déjà vu all over again.”

There has been a failure. Pearl Harbor, the unpredicted Soviet development of the Atomic bomb, the Chinese Communist victory in 1949… the equally unpredicted North Korean invasion in 1950, the Bay of Pigs failure, Vietnam, the overthrow of the Shah in 1978, and of Simosa in Nicaragua a year later, both these last events not only unpredicted, but confidently declared by our intelligence estimates as ‘impossible’, or a scandal. And Iran/Contra inevitably comes to mind here, and some others in the 1970’s.

What happens next? A commission will be appointed. Usually by the executive, but post Vietnam, often by the Congress. We recall the Hoover Commission in the 1950’s, the Church and Pike Commissions of the 1970’s, and the Iran/Contra joint Committee in the 1980’s, often forgotten are the Senate hearings of 1992, which tried to learn how we were so unprepared for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and led among other things to Senator Moynihan’s very serious proposal for doing away with the CIA altogether, and Senator Arlen Specter’s repeated and now accepted idea that the post of National Director of Intelligence and DCIA be separated.

The committee will labor long and hard, and recommend inevitably that the agencies concerned coordinate their activities better and share their information. Depending on the era, if it’s “post-attack” or “post-scandal”, the recommendations will either call for more or less executive branch independence in using the intelligence system. Usually with reference to the use of covert operations, or for more, or less congressional oversight and control of intelligence. Attention inevitably is called to the need for better, qualified officers, particularly in the area of language skills in the intelligence services.

And again, depending on the era, there will be calls for more openness, the matter of publishing the total amount of the intelligence appropriation is one example, or for less. When we call for less, as we’re doing now, the great fear is that our skilled and unscrupulous opponents will be able to use something, like merely the publication of the total intelligence budget, that one apparently innocuous tile from the intelligence mosaic, to uncover our most precious secrets, the ‘crown jewels’ so to speak.

I will close now with a dated but still useful reference and a quotation which is also dated but also useful, the reference I have here is the Congressional Research Service Report of August 15th, 1988, during Iran/Contra, on intelligence reform, recent histories and proposals. I think it’s very worth reading this relatively brief report, to see how frequently these issues are revisited, and what the results are.

Now, the quote I want to give you is from a book written by a very interesting man, now deceased, Arthur Macy Cox, who was George Kennan’s principal assistant, when George Kennan, post-WWII, was heading the State Dept’s planning office. Arthur Macy Cox went on to have a very distinguished career in government, including service in the CIA, and I had several lengthy discussions with him back in the early 1990’s.

His book is called, “The Myths of National Security: The Peril of Secret Government”, it was published by Beacon Press in 1975… he wrote then, in the midst of Watergate;

“The political demise of Richard Nixon was devastating evidence of a national illness which has pervaded our society for years, but the first Presidential resignation in our history did not arrest the disease, it merely focused attention on the need for a cure. The corruption of Watergate was a symptom of a larger malaise resulting from the use of the ‘Big Lie’ technique to deceive the American people, countless lies perpetrated under cover of a vast system of executive secrecy, justified on grounds of protecting our ‘national security’.

Unless we understand how this happened, we will not be able to restore our Democracy to health…

…the drafters of the Constitution provided us with an ingenious system of government with machinery to check and balance the use of power, but they did not anticipate the problem of secret government, nor has that problem been dealt with in subsequent constitutional amendments.

Despite a lack of safeguards, a large consensus of the American public since WWII has granted to succeeding Presidents extraordinary secret powers to protect the security of the nation. The people felt that in matters of national survival, the President should be given total trust. He should be allowed to make decisions in secret to protect our national security.

But Democracy and secrecy are incompatible, and it has now become clear that secret powers should never have been delegated without guarantees of accountability to the people’s representatives in the Congress.”

I’ll stop there, but the point is basic.

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Here are the other transcripts I have done from the briefing.

Mel Goodman - (morning remarks)
http://www.gnn.tv/B10410

Mel Goodman – (afternoon remarks)
http://www.gnn.tv/B11620

Ray McGovern – July 22nd, 2005
http://www.gnn.tv/B11700

Cynthia McKinney – July 22nd, 2005
http://www.nowpublic.com/node/16470

Lorie Van Auken – July 22nd, 2005
http://www.nowpublic.com/node/16472

Anne Norton – July 22nd, 2005
http://www.nowpublic.com/node/16484

Paul Thompson - July 22nd, 2005
http://www.gnn.tv/B10677

Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed - July 22nd, 2005
http://www.gnn.tv/B10710

John Newman, Former Military Intelligence, July 22nd, 2005
http://www.gnn.tv/B10734

(Professor Scott did his own.)
Peter Dale Scott – July 22nd, 2005
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=SCO20050729&articleId=759