Veterans for Common Sense

    The White House is sweating out the possibility that one or more top officials will soon be indicted on criminal charges. But the Bush administration is immune to prosecution for its greatest offense – its colossal and profoundly tragic incompetence.

    Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressed the administration’s arrogance and ineptitude in a talk last week that was astonishingly candid by Washington standards.

    “We have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran,” said Mr. Wilkerson. “Generally, with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita … we haven’t done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence.”

    The investigation of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby et al. is the most sensational story coming out of Washington at the moment. But the story with the gravest implications for the U.S. and the world is the overall dysfunction of the Bush regime. This is a bomb going “Tick, tick, tick . . .” What is the next disaster that this crowd will be unprepared to cope with? Or the next lunatic idea that will spring from its ideological bag of tricks?

    Mr. Wilkerson gave his talk before an audience at the New America Foundation, an independent public policy institute. On the all-important matter of national security, which many voters had seen as the strength of the administration, Mr. Wilkerson said:

    “The case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.”

    When the time came to implement the decisions, said Mr. Wilkerson, they were “presented in such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn’t know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.”

    Where was the president? According to Mr. Wilkerson, “You’ve got this collegiality there between the secretary of defense and the vice president, and you’ve got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either.”

    One of the consequences of this dysfunction, as I have noted many times, is the unending parade of dead or badly wounded men and women returning to the U.S. from the war in Iraq – a war that the administration foolishly launched but now does not know how to win or end.

    Mr. Wilkerson was especially critical of the excessive secrecy that surrounded so many of the most important decisions by the Bush administration, and of what he felt was a general policy of concentrating too much power in the hands of a small group of insiders. As much as possible, government in the United States is supposed to be open and transparent, and a fundamental principle is that decision-making should be subjected to a robust process of checks and balances.

    While not “evaluating the decision to go to war,” Mr. Wilkerson told his audience that under the present circumstances “we can’t leave Iraq. We simply can’t.” In his view, if American forces were to pull out too quickly, the U.S. would end up returning to the Middle East with “five million men and women under arms” within a decade.

    Nevertheless, he is appalled at the way the war was launched and conducted, and outraged by “the detainee abuse issue.” In 10 years, he said, when this matter is “put to the acid test, ironed out, and people have looked at it from every angle, we are going to be ashamed of what we allowed to happen.”

    Mr. Wilkerson said he has taken some heat for speaking out, but feels that “as a citizen of this great republic,” he has an obligation to do so. If nothing is done about the current state of affairs, he said, “it’s going to get even more dangerous than it already is.”

The White House Cabal

By Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2005

LAWRENCE B. WILKERSON served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell from 2002 to 2005.

IN PRESIDENT BUSH’S first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security — including vital decisions about postwar Iraq — were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

When I first discussed this group in a speech last week at the New America Foundation in Washington, my comments caused a significant stir because I had been chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell between 2002 and 2005.

But it’s absolutely true. I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal.

Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This furtive process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and “guardians of the turf.”

But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well.

I watched these dual decision-making processes operate for four years at the State Department. As chief of staff for 27 months, I had a door adjoining the secretary of State’s office. I read virtually every document he read. I read the intelligence briefings and spoke daily with people from all across government.

I knew that what I was observing was not what Congress intended when it passed the 1947 National Security Act. The law created the National Security Council — consisting of the president, vice president and the secretaries of State and Defense — to make sure the nation’s vital national security decisions were thoroughly vetted. The NSC has often been expanded, depending on the president in office, to include the CIA director, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Treasury secretary and others, and it has accumulated a staff of sometimes more than 100 people.

But many of the most crucial decisions from 2001 to 2005 were not made within the traditional NSC process.

Scholars and knowledgeable critics of the U.S. decision-making process may rightly say, so what? Haven’t all of our presidents in the last half-century failed to conform to the usual process at one time or another? Isn’t it the president’s prerogative to make decisions with whomever he pleases? Moreover, can he not ignore whomever he pleases? Why should we care that President Bush gave over much of the critical decision-making to his vice president and his secretary of Defense?

Both as a former academic and as a person who has been in the ring with the bull, I believe that there are two reasons we should care. First, such departures from the process have in the past led us into a host of disasters, including the last years of the Vietnam War, the national embarrassment of Watergate (and the first resignation of a president in our history), the Iran-Contra scandal and now the ruinous foreign policy of George W. Bush.

But a second and far more important reason is that the nature of both governance and crisis has changed in the modern age.

From managing the environment to securing sufficient energy resources, from dealing with trafficking in human beings to performing peacekeeping missions abroad, governing is vastly more complicated than ever before in human history.

Further, the crises the U.S. government confronts today are so multifaceted, so complex, so fast-breaking — and almost always with such incredible potential for regional and global ripple effects — that to depart from the systematic decision-making process laid out in the 1947 statute invites disaster.

Discounting the professional experience available within the federal bureaucracy — and ignoring entirely the inevitable but often frustrating dissent that often arises therein — makes for quick and painless decisions. But when government agencies are confronted with decisions in which they did not participate and with which they frequently disagree, their implementation of those decisions is fractured, uncoordinated and inefficient. This is particularly the case if the bureaucracies called upon to execute the decisions are in strong competition with one another over scarce money, talented people, “turf” or power.

It takes firm leadership to preside over the bureaucracy. But it also takes a willingness to listen to dissenting opinions. It requires leaders who can analyze, synthesize, ponder and decide.

The administration’s performance during its first four years would have been even worse without Powell’s damage control. At least once a week, it seemed, Powell trooped over to the Oval Office and cleaned all the dog poop off the carpet. He held a youthful, inexperienced president’s hand. He told him everything would be all right because he, the secretary of State, would fix it. And he did — everything from a serious crisis with China when a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft was struck by a Chinese F-8 fighter jet in April 2001, to the secretary’s constant reassurances to European leaders following the bitter breach in relations over the Iraq war. It wasn’t enough, of course, but it helped.

Today, we have a president whose approval rating is 38{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} and a vice president who speaks only to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces. We have a secretary of Defense presiding over the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our overstretched armed forces (no surprise to ignored dissenters such as former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki or former Army Secretary Thomas White).

It’s a disaster. Given the choice, I’d choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time.

Goodwill Envoy Hughes Claims Saddam Hussein Gassed ‘hundreds of Thousands’ of Iraqis

By Chris Brummitt, Associated Press, October 21, 2005

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) – U.S. envoy Karen Hughes on Friday defended Washington’s decision to go to war against Iraq in front of a skeptical audience, saying Saddam Hussein had gassed to death “hundreds of thousands” of his own people. A State Department official later said she misspoke about the number.

Hughes, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, made the comment before a group of Indonesian students who repeatedly attacked her about Washington’s original rationale for the war, Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. No such arms were ever discovered.

“The consensus of the world intelligence community was that Saddam was a very dangerous threat,” Hughes said days after the ousted dictator went on trial in Baghdad on charges of murder and torture in a 1982 massacre of 148 Shiites in the town of Dujail.

“After all, he had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people,” she told a small auditorium with around 100 students. “He had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people using poison gas.”

Although at least 300,000 Iraqis are said to have been killed during Saddam’s decades-long rule – only about 5,000 are believed to have been gassed to death in a 1988 attack in the Kurdish north.

Hughes twice repeated the statement after being challenged by journalists. A State Department official later called The Associated Press to say she misspoke. The official, who was traveling with Hughes, spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to talk publicly to the media.

Hughes, a longtime adviser to President Bush, was visiting the world’s most populous Muslim nation as part of Washington’s effort to enhance the U.S. image abroad.

Students from Indonesia’s oldest Muslim university pounded her with questions on U.S. foreign policy, in particular the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and Washington’s support of Israel.

One said the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks should be taken as a warning to America for interfering in the affairs of other countries.

“Your policies are creating hostilities among Muslims,” a female student, Lailatul Qadar, told Hughes. “It’s Bush in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and maybe it’s going to be in Indonesia, I don’t know. Who’s the terrorist? Bush or us Muslims?”

Hughes, who has also faced tough questions in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey since taking up her post two months ago, said she was not surprised by the level of hostility.

“I understand that there are a lot of young people around the world, and a lot of people in our own country, who don’t agree with what we did in Iraq,” she told reporters. “We have to engage in the debate. That is what America is all about.”

Hughes also said the video of alleged desecration of the bodies of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan by U.S. soldiers was “abhorrent.”

“The important thing that the world needs to know is that it is a violation of our policy,” she said.

There has been no public reaction so far in Indonesia to the video, broadcast by Australia’s SBS television network, but clerics in other Islamic nations expressed outrage and warned of a possible violent anti-American backlash.

Indonesia is a moderate Islamic country with significant Christian, Hindu and Buddhist minorities. It has a long tradition of secularism. Many of the 16 students selected to debate with Hughes on stage were women, all in brightly colored headscarves and some in tight jeans.

Anti-American sentiments have risen sharply in Indonesia – seen by Washington as a close ally in the war on terror – since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The two countries have had close ties since the mid-1960s when a pro-U.S. military dictatorship seized power in Jakarta. This was replaced by a democratic government in 1999.

Hughes wraps up her three-day visit Saturday with a visit to the tsunami-wracked province of Aceh.

GAO Report Finds Flaws in Electronic Voting

Friday 21 October 2005

Rep. Waxman led twelve members of Congress today in releasing a new GAO report that found security and reliability flaws in the electronic voting process.

In a joint press release, Rep. Waxman said, “The GAO report indicates that we need to get serious and act quickly to improve the security of electronic voting machines. The report makes clear that there is a lack of transparency and accountability in electronic voting systems – from the day that contracts are signed with manufacturers to the counting of electronic votes on Election Day. State and local officials are spending a great deal of money on machines without concrete proof that they are secure and reliable.”

The GAO report found flaws in security, access, and hardware controls, as well as weak security management practices by voting machine vendors. The report identified multiple examples of actual operational failures in real elections and found that while national initiatives to improve the security and reliability of electronic voting systems are underway, “it is unclear when these initiatives will be available to assist state and local election authorities.”

Rep. Waxman also released a fact sheet summarizing the report’s key findings.

Fact Sheet

Overall Findings

In October 2005, the Government Accountability Office released a comprehensive analysis of the concerns raised by the increasing use of electronic voting machines.

Overall, GAO found that “significant concerns about the security and reliability of electronic voting systems” have been raised (p. 22).

GAO indicated that “some of these concerns have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes” (p. 23).

According to GAO, “election officials, computer security experts, citizen advocacy groups, and others have raised significant concerns about the security and reliability of electronic voting systems, citing instances of weak security controls, system design flaws, inadequate system version control, inadequate security testing, incorrect system configuration, poor security management, and vague or incomplete standards, among other issues. … The security and reliability concerns raised in recent reports merit the focused attention of federal, state, and local authorities responsible for election administration” (p. 22-23).

Specific Problems Identified by GAO

Based on reports from election experts, GAO compiled numerous examples of problems with electronic voting systems. These included:

Flaws in System Security Controls

Examples of problems reported by GAO include (1) computer systems that fail to encrypt data files containing cast votes, allowing them to be viewed or modified without detection by internal auditing systems; (2) systems that could allow individuals to alter ballot definition files so that votes cast for one candidate are counted for another; and (3) weak controls that allowed the alteration of memory cards used in optical scan machines, potentially impacting election results. GAO concluded that “these weaknesses could damage the integrity of ballots, votes, and voting system software by allowing unauthorized modifications (p. 25).

Flaws in Access Controls

Examples of problems reported by GAO include (1) the failure to password-protect files and functions; (2) the use of easily guessed passwords or identical passwords for numerous systems built by the same manufacturer; and (3) the failure to secure memory cards used to secure voting systems, potentially allowing individuals to vote multiple times, change vote totals, or produce false election reports.

According to GAO, “in the event of lax supervision, the … flaws could allow unauthorized personnel to disrupt operations or modify data and programs that are crucial to the accuracy and integrity of the voting process” (p. 26).

Flaws in Physical Hardware Controls

In addition to identifying flaws in software and access controls, GAO identified basic problems with the physical hardware of electronic voting machines. Example of problems reported by GAO included locks that could be easily picked or were all controlled by the same keys, and unprotected switches used to turn machines on and off that could easily be used to disrupt the voting process (p. 27).

Weak Security Management Practices by Voting Machine Vendors

Experts contacted by GAO reported a number of concerns about the practices of voting machine vendors, including the failure to conduct background checks on programmers and system developers, the lack of internal security protocols during software development, and the failure to establish clear chain of custody procedures for handling and transporting software (p. 29).

Actual Examples of Voting System Failure

GAO found multiple examples of actual operational failures in real elections. These examples include the following incidents:

In California, a county presented voters with an incorrect electronic ballot, meaning they could not vote in certain races (p. 29).

In Pennsylvania, a county made a ballot error on an electronic voting system that resulted in the county’s undervote percentage reaching 80{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} in some precincts (p. 29-30).

In North Carolina, electronic voting machines continued to accept votes after their memories were full, causing over 4,000 votes to be lost (p. 31).

In Florida, a county reported that touch screens took up to an hour to activate and had to be activated sequentially, resulting in long delays (p. 31).

Current Federal Standards and Initiatives Are Ineffective and Are Unlikely to Provide Solutions in a Timely Fashion

GAO reported that voluntary standards for electronic voting, adopted in 2002 by the Federal Election Commission, have been criticized for containing vague and incomplete security provisions, inadequate provisions for commercial products and networks, and inadequate documentation requirements (pp. 32-33).

GAO further reported that “security experts and some election officials have expressed concern that tests currently performed by independent testing authorities and state and local election officials do not adequately assess electronic voting system security and reliability,” and that “these concerns are amplified by what some perceive as a lack of transparency in the testing process” (p. 34). The GAO report indicated that national initiatives to improve voting system security and reliability of electronic voting systems (such as updated standards from the Election Assistance Commission; federal accreditation of independent testing laboratories; and certification of voting systems to national standards) are underway, but ” a majority of these efforts either lack specific plans for implementation in time to affect the 2006 general election or are not expected to be completed until after the 2006 election” (p. 43). As a result, GAO found that “it is unclear when these initiatives will be available to assist state and local election officials” (p. 43). According to GAO, “Until these efforts are completed, there is a risk that many state and local jurisdictions will rely on voting systems that were not developed, acquired, tested, operated, or managed in accordance with rigorous security and reliability standards – potentially affecting the reliability of future elections and voter confidence in the accuracy of the vote count” (p. 53).

Recommendations:

GAO made several recommendations, primarily aimed at the federal Election Assistance Commission (p. 53). GAO recommended that the EAC should:

Collaborate with appropriate technical experts to define specific tasks, outcomes, milestones, and resource needs required to improve voting system standards;

Expeditiously establish documented policies, criteria, and procedures for certifying voting systems; and

Improve support for state and local officials via improved information dissemination information on voting machine software, the problems and vulnerabilities of voting machines, and the “best practices” used by state and local officials to ensure the security of electronic voting machines.

To view the full report: http://www.democrats.reform.house.gov/Documents/20051021122225-53143.pdf

AS I suspected six months ago, and U.S. military and Bush Administration civilian officials confirmed, U.S. forces have invaded Syria and engaged in combat with Syrian forces.

An unknown number of Syrians are acknowledged to have been killed; the number of Americans – if any – who have died so far has not yet been revealed by the U.S. sources, who, by the way, insist on remaining faceless and nameless.

The parallel with the Vietnam War, where a Nixon administration deeply involved in a losing war expanded the conflict – fruitlessly – to neighboring Cambodia, is obvious. The result was not changed in Vietnam; Cambodia itself was plunged into dangerous chaos which climaxed in the killing fields, where an estimated 1 million Cambodians died as a result of internal conflict.

On the U.S. side, no declaration of war preceded the invasion of Syria, in spite of the requirements of the War Powers Act of 1973. There is no indication that Congress was involved in the decision to go in. If members were briefed, none of them has chosen to share that important information with the American people.

Presumably, the Bush Administration’s intention is simply to add any casualties of the Syrian conflict to those of the war in Iraq, which now stand at 1,970. The financial cost of expanding the war to Syria would also presumably be added to the cost of the Iraq war, now estimated at $201 billion.

The Bush Administration would claim that it is expanding the war in Iraq into Syria to try to bring it to an end, the kind of screwy non-logic that kept us in Vietnam for a decade and cost 58,193 American lives.

Others would see the attacks in Syria as a desperate political move on the part of an administration with its back against the wall, with an economy plagued by inflation, the weak response to Hurricane Katrina, investigations of senior executive and legislative officials, and the bird flu flapping its wings on the horizon. The idea, I suppose, is to distract us by an attack on Syria, now specifically targeted by U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad.

And then there is the tired old United Nations. An invasion by one sovereign member, the United States, of the territory of another sovereign member (Syria), requires U.N. Security Council action.

Some observers have argued that destabilizing Syria, creating chaos there, even bringing about regime change from President Bashar Assad, would somehow improve Israel’s security posture in the region. The argument runs that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was the biggest regional threat to Israel; Mr. Assad’s Syria is second. The United States got rid of Saddam; now it should get rid of the Assad regime in Damascus.

The trouble with that argument, whether it is made by Americans or Israelis, is that, in practice, it depends on the validity of the premise that chaos and civil war – the disintegration of the state – in Iraq and Syria are better for Israel in terms of long-term security than the perpetuation of stable, albeit nominally hostile, regimes.

The evidence of what has happened in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in early 2003 is to the contrary. Could anyone argue that Israel is made safer by a burning conflict in Iraq that has now attracted Islamic extremist fighters from across the Middle East, Europe, and Asia? Saddam’s regime was bad, but this is a good deal worse, and looks endless.

Is there any advantage at all to the United States, or to Israel, in replicating Iraq in Syria?

For that is what is at stake. Syria in its political, ethnic, and religious structure is very similar to Iraq. Iraq, prior to the U.S. bust-up, was ruled by a Sunni minority, with a Shiite majority and Kurdish and Christian minorities. Syria is ruled by an Alawite minority, with a Sunni majority and Kurdish and Christian minorities. That is the structure, not unlike many states in the Middle East, that the Bush Administration is in the process of hacking away at.

It seems utterly crazy to me.

One could say, “Interesting theory; let’s play it out,” if it weren’t for the American men and women, not to mention the Iraqis and now Syrians, dying in pursuit of that policy.

What needs to be done now is for the Congress, and through them, the American people, the United Nations, and America’s allies, the ones who are left, to have the opportunity to express their thoughts on America’s expanding the Iraq war to Syria.

A decision to invade Syria is not a decision for Mr. Bush, heading a beleaguered administration, to make for us on his own.

Dan Simpson, a retired diplomat, is a member of the editorial boards of The Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Spanish Judge Issues Warrant for Three GIs on Charges of Killing Reporter in Iraq

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, Filed at 10:29 p.m. ET, October 19, 2005

MADRID, Spain (AP) — A judge has issued an international arrest warrant for three U.S. soldiers whose tank fired on a Baghdad hotel during the Iraq war, killing a Spanish journalist and a Ukrainian cameraman, a court official said Wednesday.

Judge Santiago Pedraz issued the warrant for Sgt. Shawn Gibson, Capt. Philip Wolford and Lt. Col. Philip de Camp, all from the U.S. 3rd Infantry, which is based in Fort Stewart, Ga.

Jose Couso, who worked for the Spanish television network Telecinco, died April 8, 2003, after a U.S. army tank crew fired a shell on Hotel Palestine in Baghdad where many journalists were staying to cover the war.

Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk, a Ukrainian, also was killed.

Pedraz had sent two requests to the United States — in April 2004 and June 2005 — to have statements taken from the suspects or to obtain permission for a Spanish delegation to quiz them. Both went unanswered.

He said he issued the arrest order because of a lack of judicial cooperation from the United States regarding the case.

The warrant ‘is the only effective measure to ensure the presence of the suspects in the case being handled by Spanish justice, given the lack of judicial cooperation by U.S. authorities,’ the judge said in the warrant.

The Pentagon had no immediate information and said it was looking into it.

U.S. officials have insisted that the soldiers believed they were being shot at when they opened fire.

Following the Palestine incident, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell said a review of the incident found that the use of force was justified.

In late 2003, the National Court, acting on a request from Couso’s family, agreed to consider filing criminal charges against three members of the tank crew.

Fort Stewart spokeswoman Jennifer Scales said the three no longer are assigned to Fort Stewart or the 3rd Infantry Division.

De Camp, who is now an adjunct mathematics professor at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., said three investigations into the incident — two military investigations and one by the Committee to Protect Journalists — had exonerated all three men.

‘We had no clue there were journalists over at that hotel,’ he said. ‘We would not have shot at them.’

The retired officer also said his men were constantly taking risks by letting people get close to their convoy so that they could verify whether they were enemy combatants.

When asked if he would turn himself in, de Camp said, ‘I don’t know, I’ve got to get some legal advice.’

Pilar Hermoso, an attorney for Couso’s family, welcomed the decision, although she recognized that it would be difficult to get the soldiers extradited to Spain, the state news agency Efe reported.

Small protests over the killing have been staged outside the U.S. Embassy in Madrid nearly every month since Couso’s death.

Under Spanish law, a crime committed against a Spaniard abroad can be prosecuted here if it is not investigated in the country where it is committed.

——

Associated Press writer Michael Felberbaum in Richmond, Va., contributed to this report.