60 Years of Faulty Logic (James Carroll)

[Octafish]

Whatever happened to the "Peace Dividend"?



... let alone the two trillion dollars the Pentagon can't find?

60 Years of Faulty Logic

by James Carroll
Published on Monday, March 12, 2007 by the Boston Globe

SIXTY YEARS AGO today, Harry Truman went before a joint session of Congress to announce what became known as the Truman Doctrine. "At the present moment in world history, nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life." With that, an era of bipolarity was inaugurated, dividing the world between forces of good and evil.

The speech amounted, as one of Truman's advisers characterized it, to a declaration of religious war. In the transcendent struggle between Moscow and Washington, "nonalignment" was not an option. Truman declared that the United States would actively support "free" people anywhere who were resisting either internal or external threats to that freedom. The "free world" was born, but so, eventually, were disastrous wars in Korea and Vietnam.

The occasion of Truman's pronouncement was his decision to militarily support one side in the civil war in Greece, and with that, the deadly precedent of American intervention in foreign civil wars was set. Fear of communism became a driving force of politics and a justification for vast military expenditures.

Nine days after announcing the Truman Doctrine, the president issued an executive order mandating loyalty oaths and security checks for federal employees, the start of the domestic red scare. The "paranoid style" of American life, in Richard Hofstadter's phrase, was set.

That style lives. Democrats are lining up to attack the Bush administration's catastrophe in Iraq -- not because that war was wrong to start with, but because it has turned out so badly. The administration, meanwhile, has repudiated its go-it-alone militarism in favor of nascent diplomatic initiatives with North Korea, Syria, and Iran -- not because the virtues of diplomacy are suddenly so evident, but because everything else it tried led to disaster. Bush's failures are prompting important shifts, both by his critics and advisers. But no one is asking basic questions about the assumptions on which US policies have been based for 60 years.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0312-21.htm

Add to the above, "Secret Government" and it's: "America. We have a problem."

[IChing]

1. Kick and nominated---good article --secret government is right n/t

[Octafish]

2. A month after the assassination of President Kennedy, former President Truman...

...wrote the CIA should stick to giving advice, not acting as a secret agency accountable to no one.

Harry Truman Writes:

Limit CIA Role To Intelligence

By Harry S Truman
Copyright, 1963, by Harry S Truman
The Washington Post
December 22, 1963 - page A11

INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21 — I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.

I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.

Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.

But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.

Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department "treatment" or interpretations.

I wanted and needed the information in its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.

Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being "upset."

For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about "Yankee imperialism," "exploitive capitalism," "war-mongering," "monopolists," in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.

I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.

But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.

http://www.maebrussell.com/Prouty/Harry%20Truman's%20CIA%20article.html

President Truman may've been there at the beginning, but he was never told what the CIA would be doing, let alone hiring to run it. It was after Dallas that he realized just what was happening.

The CIA and Nazi War Criminals

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB146/index.htm

Names like Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Rheinhard Gehlen. Of course, Prescott Bush and Averel Harriman never left the building.

[Octafish]

3. Rumsfeld's Dr. Strangelove

These pukes love nukes.

war stories

Rumsfeld's Dr. Strangelove

Keith Payne says 7,000 warheads aren't enough.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, May 12, 2003, at 6:23 PM ET

Last May 9, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted to repeal a 10-year ban on the research and development of "low-yield" nuclear weapons—defined as nukes having an explosive power smaller than 5 kilotons. (The House committee will take up the measure this week.) The Bush administration has lobbied heavily for the repeal. Democrats oppose the idea on the grounds that "mini-nukes"—by blurring the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons—make nuclear war more thinkable and, therefore, in the minds of some, more doable.

Some in the Bush administration are living proof of this objection. They want to demystify nuclear weapons, strip away the taboo against their use, and insinuate them into the arsenal of U.S. war-fighting tools. A key figure in this effort is Keith Payne.

Payne is not a well-known figure, even in Washington policy circles. But he ought to be. He is the deputy assistant secretary of defense for "forces policy"—essentially, the Pentagon's top civilian official assigned to the development, procurement, planning, and possible use of nuclear weapons.

For 20 years before he came to the Pentagon at the start of the George W. Bush administration, Payne was at the forefront of a small group of think-tank mavens—outspoken but, at the time, marginal—who argued not only that nuclear weapons were usable, but that nuclear war was, in a meaningful sense, winnable. He first made his mark with an article in the summer 1980 issue of Foreign Policy (written with fellow hawk Colin Gray) called "Victory Is Possible." Among its pronouncements: "an intelligent United States offensive strategy, wedded to homeland defenses, should reduce U.S. casualties to approximately 20 million … a level compatible with national survival and recovery." (As Gen. Buck Turgidson, the George C. Scott character in Dr. Strangelove, put it, "I'm not saying we won't get our hair mussed up, but 10-20 million tops, depending on the breaks.")

Payne was in his 20s, working for Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute, at the time he co-wrote the article, but anyone who would dismiss it as youthful extremism should look at a paper he wrote in January 2001, titled "Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control." Payne wrote it as president of the National Institute for Public Policy, a conservative research organization in Fairfax, Va. The paper came out of a panel that included Payne's old colleague Colin Gray, as well as Stephen J. Hadley (who is now Bush's deputy national security adviser) and Stephen Cambone (now an assistant secretary of defense and a member of Rumsfeld's inner circle).

CONTINUED...(I hope)...

http://www.slate.com/id/2082846/

Warmongers are insane.