History > 2008 > USA > Wars > Pentagon (I)
Advertising
Sending
in the Marines
(to Recruit Women)
April 21,
2008
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA
THE Marines
are looking for a few good women.
Actually, they will take as many as they can get. Faced with the difficulty of
recruiting during a long and unpopular war, the United States Marine Corps has
started marketing itself to women in a concerted way for the first time. It is
running ads in magazines like Shape, Self and Fitness, which appeal mainly to
female readers, as well as through more mainstream outlets like “American Idol,”
where the message is a unisex one of patriotism rather than macho swagger.
The Marine Corps still runs its traditional ads — during National Basketball
Association and National Hockey League games, and in magazines like Sports
Illustrated and Men’s Fitness — often showing male recruits parachuting from
airplanes, wielding big guns, driving heavy tanks and stampeding across the
ground.
But now it is also showing a softer side. In the latest campaign, a print ad
shows a female marine striking a martial arts pose in front of a crowd of men
who are looking up to her as their leader. The tag line: “There are no female
marines. Only marines.”
The campaign is a big departure for the Marine Corps, which started accepting
women for clerical duties in 1918 but until last year advertised to them only
fitfully. During World War II, the most memorable recruitment ads aimed at women
came from the Army and the Navy.
In 1973, when the military dropped the draft in favor of a volunteer force, the
Marines introduced its “few good men” slogan and ran at least one spot for
women, reaching out to high school graduates and “college gals” with a brochure
that had a picture of a flower on it.
In the 1990s, when the Marines Corps was having trouble reaching recruitment
goals, it ran a scattering of ads in magazines like Seventeen and Sports
Illustrated for Women, using tag lines like “You can look at models, or you can
be one” and “Get a makeover that’s more than skin deep.” That outreach “wasn’t
as sophisticated as it is now,” said Jay Cronin, management director of JWT, a
unit of the WPP Group, which has been the Marine Corps’ advertising agency for
more than 60 years.
Mr. Cronin said the current effort was much different because everyone involved
took the time to “understand the psychographics,” that is, figuring out which
women might actually want to join the military, and why. That is why the
campaign aims at athletic women, not just all women graduating from high school,
and the messages conveyed are much more egalitarian.
Although most combat jobs are off-limits to them, women make up 6.2 percent of
the Marine Corps and go through the same basic training as men.
“We had never done much female outreach,” said Lt. Col. Mike Zeliff, assistant
chief of staff for marketing and advertising for the Marines Corps in Quantico,
Va. “but there was an opportunity for us to go after the athletic, young woman
who would be well suited to graduate from boot camp. We asked ourselves, ‘What
can we do to get the message out to these young women?’ ”
Women are not the only ones being courted specifically. The Marines Corps is
reaching out to Latinos with ads in La Raza newspaper that emphasize family and
honor (“Each unit in the Corps is a family, and each member knows they never
stand alone”), and to Arab-Americans with a message about nationality and
identity (“I am American. I am Arab. I am a Marine ... I know where I stand”).
“We never used to have much of a targeting strategy — we were just looking for
18-24-year-old men” said Colonel Zeliff. “Today, we are more niche than ever.”
Given the drumbeat of bad news from the lingering conflicts in Afghanistan and
Iraq, where American military casualties recently topped 4,000, the sell can be
a tough one. Sentiment against recuiting has flared on some campuses, as well as
in Berkeley, Calif., where the City Council approved a measure in February
asking Marine recruiters to vacate their downtown office.
Dana Balicki, national media coordinator for Code Pink, a women’s peace group,
called the Marine campaign “just another example of potentially misleading
tactics used to sell the war to young people, and especially young women.”
Talking specifically about the print ad that shows a woman in a leadership role,
Ms. Balicki said, “She’s supposed to look like she’s being empowered, but she’s
in a typical self-defense stance. After knowing the statistics and talking to
women who have experienced sexual trauma or violence in the military, it’s hard
to think of it as empowerment.”
As opposition against the war continues, Congress has ordered the Marines and
the Army to augment their forces. All branches of the military have been
reaching out to nontraditional audiences, but none have done so quite as
emphatically as the Marine Corps, which is the fourth-largest of the five
branches (the Coast Guard is the smallest). Its advertising budget is $157.4
million this year, up from $152.4 million in fiscal year 2007.
The ad featuring a woman commander is intended to appeal to young women who are
weary of being separated from boys and men in sports and are eager to prove
themselves on a larger stage, said Marshall Lauck, JWT’s lead executive on the
Marines account.
“The message is that the Marine Corps offers a unique opportunity to earn that
title and be shoulder to shoulder with your male counterparts,” Mr. Lauck said.
“That’s an important aspect for the young women seeking that challenge, women
seeking an opportunity for a great and selfless endeavor.”
The Marines also broke from tradition earlier this year by running a 60-second
spot during several episodes of “American Idol.” Titled “America’s Marines,” the
ad featured marines standing in formation against various national landmarks. It
was intended to appeal to a general audience, including parents and other people
whom military recruiters refer to as “influencers.”
That ad “helped us get that female audience that we’re looking for,” said Steve
Harding, a partner at the Marine Corps’ media agency, MindShare (which places
ads), which is also part of WPP.
The effect of the publicity is difficult to measure. There has been a small
increase in the number of female recruits — to 2,507 in 2007 from 2,320 in 2006
and 2,282 in 2005— but the Marine Corps says it is particularly pleased by the
volume of responses to the campaign. The magazine ads include reply cards, and,
Mr. Harding said, they yielded more than 1,044 “qualified leads” in 2007, though
only two turned into enlistments.
One is Ana Castillo, a senior at William Chrisman High School in Independence,
Mo., who mailed in a reply card last September after seeing an ad in a women’s
fitness magazine in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. Her older brother is
a Navy veteran, and while she had been seriously considering joining the
military, the ad prompted her to take action.
Ms. Castillo seems to be precisely the kind of young woman being sought by the
advertising. She plays soccer and softball at high school and says she is hungry
to prove herself on more dangerous fields.
“The Marines are the toughest,” she said in a telephone interview. “They have
the longest boot camp, the highest standards. The Marines want people to
actually want to be in the Marines, not just be in it for the money.”
It was those traits that Ms. Castillo saw reflected in the magazine ad, as well
as in the words of the recruiter who called her a week after she mailed the
reply card. She will turn 18 on June 24 and plans to leave for boot camp on July
7, after her high school graduation.
While the Marines seem to be taking the lead, other branches of the military are
increasing their niche efforts as well. The Navy, for example, has started using
the Web to recruit women for nontraditional jobs like aviation mechanics,
placing banner ads on portals like Yahoo and movie and video game Web sites.
“We did e-mail blasts to women only, and what we found was lots of women out
there have an interest” in joining the Navy, but they did not know what jobs
were available to them, said Kathleen Donald, an executive vice president and
account director with Navy’s ad firm, Campbell-Ewald, a unit of the Interpublic
Group of Companies.
Although military officials cite a number of reasons for their recruiting woes —
high obesity rates in America, for example, and young people’s shifting
attitudes toward military service — the fact is that the images from the
battlefront are hard to counteract.
“We’re in the midst of a very difficult war, and the ground forces are taking a
pounding,” said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer and military analyst at
the Lexington Institute, a research firm.
“I think what the Marine Corps is finding is that even recruiting for a small
force in the midst of an unpopular war is becoming something of a challenge,” he
said. “They can no longer ignore people purely on the basis of demographic or
inscriptive characteristics.”
Maj. Wes Hayes, a spokesman for the Marine Corps Recruiting Command, said in
response to Mr. Thompson’s comment, “Look at our fiscal year missions. Since May
2005, we’ve met or exceeded our recruiting goals. Remember, recruiting is a
marathon and not a sprint.”
Ms. Castillo said her parents needed some persuading to let her join, despite
her brother’s experience in the Navy.
“My mom, well, I’m her little girl,” she said. “She wants me to go to school. My
dad was proud. He wanted me to go into the military, but he wants me to go into
the Air Force.”
Like anyone entering the Marine Corps today, Ms. Castillo is keenly aware of
where she is probably headed. “I’m O.K. with it,” she said. “If I get sent to
Iraq, I’m going to be ready.”
Sending in the Marines (to Recruit Women), NYT, 21.4.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/media/21adcol.html
Message
Machine
Behind
TV Analysts,
Pentagon’s Hidden Hand
April 20,
2008
The New York Times
By DAVID BARSTOW
In the
summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism
over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of
our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from
United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.
The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday
morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets
normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a
carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of
thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long
service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about
the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information
apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news
coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New
York Times has found.
The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this
day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a
powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military
contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.
Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and
sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the
plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military
contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or
consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of
smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for
hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war
on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy
access to senior officials are highly prized.
Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control
over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind
of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from
inside the major TV and radio networks.
Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military
leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and
budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given
access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the
White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney,
Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.
In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points,
sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some
analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing
their access.
A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to
dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military
analysis.
“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your
mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox
News analyst, said.
Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare
at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a
sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he
said.
As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap
between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent
inquiries and books later revealed.
“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”
The Pentagon defended its relationship with military analysts, saying they had
been given only factual information about the war. “The intent and purpose of
this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people,”
Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said.
It was, Mr. Whitman added, “a bit incredible” to think retired military officers
could be “wound up” and turned into “puppets of the Defense Department.”
Many analysts strongly denied that they had either been co-opted or had allowed
outside business interests to affect their on-air comments, and some have used
their platforms to criticize the conduct of the war. Several, like Jeffrey D.
McCausland, a CBS military analyst and defense industry lobbyist, said they kept
their networks informed of their outside work and recused themselves from
coverage that touched on business interests.
“I’m not here representing the administration,” Dr. McCausland said.
Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged only a limited understanding of
their analysts’ interactions with the administration. They said that while they
were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their
analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding outside
financial interests. The onus is on their analysts to disclose conflicts, they
said. And whatever the contributions of military analysts, they also noted the
many network journalists who have covered the war for years in all its
complexity.
Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of
the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully
sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages,
transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and
Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.
These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines
between government and journalism have been obliterated.
Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as
“message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver
administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of
their own opinions.”
Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per
appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating
behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon
tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H.
Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf
Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon
copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although
certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter
critics.
“Good work,” Thomas G. McInerney, a retired Air Force general, consultant and
Fox News analyst, wrote to the Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in
late 2006. “We will use it.”
Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a
rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of
it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles
revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a
senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: “I think our analysts —
properly armed — can push back in that arena.”
The documents released by the Pentagon do not show any quid pro quo between
commentary and contracts. But some analysts said they had used the special
access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future
business possibilities.
John C. Garrett is a retired Army colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News TV and
radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win Pentagon
contracts, including in Iraq. In promotional materials, he states that as a
military analyst he “is privy to weekly access and briefings with the secretary
of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high level policy
makers in the administration.” One client told investors that Mr. Garrett’s
special access and decades of experience helped him “to know in advance — and in
detail — how best to meet the needs” of the Defense Department and other
agencies.
In interviews Mr. Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his dual
roles. He said he had gotten “information you just otherwise would not get,”
from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq. He also
acknowledged using this access and information to identify opportunities for
clients. “You can’t help but look for that,” he said, adding, “If you know a
capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. “That’s good for
everybody.”
At the same time, in e-mail messages to the Pentagon, Mr. Garrett displayed an
eagerness to be supportive with his television and radio commentary. “Please let
me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would
prefer to downplay,” he wrote in January 2007, before President Bush went on TV
to describe the surge strategy in Iraq.
Conversely, the administration has demonstrated that there is a price for
sustained criticism, many analysts said. “You’ll lose all access,” Dr.
McCausland said.
With a majority of Americans calling the war a mistake despite all
administration attempts to sway public opinion, the Pentagon has focused in the
last couple of years on cultivating in particular military analysts frequently
seen and heard in conservative news outlets, records and interviews show.
Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 — the first
of six such Guantánamo trips — which was designed to mobilize analysts against
the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane
treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the
flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on
their key messages — how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse
endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.
The results came quickly. The analysts went on TV and radio, decrying Amnesty
International, criticizing calls to close the facility and asserting that all
detainees were treated humanely.
“The impressions that you’re getting from the media and from the various
pronouncements being made by people who have not been here in my opinion are
totally false,” Donald W. Shepperd, a retired Air Force general, reported live
on CNN by phone from Guantánamo that same afternoon.
The next morning, Montgomery Meigs, a retired Army general and NBC analyst,
appeared on “Today.” “There’s been over $100 million of new construction,” he
reported. “The place is very professionally run.”
Within days, transcripts of the analysts’ appearances were circulated to senior
White House and Pentagon officials, cited as evidence of progress in the battle
for hearts and minds at home.
Charting
the Campaign
By early 2002, detailed planning for a possible Iraq invasion was under way, yet
an obstacle loomed. Many Americans, polls showed, were uneasy about invading a
country with no clear connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Pentagon and White
House officials believed the military analysts could play a crucial role in
helping overcome this resistance.
Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon’s
dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs,
had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what she called
“information dominance.” In a spin-saturated news culture, she argued, opinion
is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and utterly independent.
And so even before Sept. 11, she built a system within the Pentagon to recruit
“key influentials” — movers and shakers from all walks who with the proper
ministrations might be counted on to generate support for Mr. Rumsfeld’s
priorities.
In the months after Sept. 11, as every network rushed to retain its own all-star
squad of retired military officers, Ms. Clarke and her staff sensed a new
opportunity. To Ms. Clarke’s team, the military analysts were the ultimate “key
influential” — authoritative, most of them decorated war heroes, all reaching
mass audiences.
The analysts, they noticed, often got more airtime than network reporters, and
they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters. They
were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while the
analysts were in the news media, they were not of the news media. They were
military men, many of them ideologically in sync with the administration’s
neoconservative brain trust, many of them important players in a military
industry anticipating large budget increases to pay for an Iraq war.
Even analysts with no defense industry ties, and no fondness for the
administration, were reluctant to be critical of military leaders, many of whom
were friends. “It is very hard for me to criticize the United States Army,” said
William L. Nash, a retired Army general and ABC analyst. “It is my life.”
Other administrations had made sporadic, small-scale attempts to build
relationships with the occasional military analyst. But these were trifling
compared with what Ms. Clarke’s team had in mind. Don Meyer, an aide to Ms.
Clarke, said a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main
focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were
secondary. “We didn’t want to rely on them to be our primary vehicle to get
information out,” Mr. Meyer said.
The Pentagon’s regular press office would be kept separate from the military
analysts. The analysts would instead be catered to by a small group of political
appointees, with the point person being Brent T. Krueger, another senior aide to
Ms. Clarke. The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted
traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to
write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV
stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration
accomplishments. The Pentagon itself has made covert payments to Iraqi
newspapers to publish coalition propaganda.
Rather than complain about the “media filter,” each of these techniques simply
converted the filter into an amplifier. This time, Mr. Krueger said, the
military analysts would in effect be “writing the op-ed” for the war.
Assembling
the Team
From the start, interviews show, the White House took a keen interest in which
analysts had been identified by the Pentagon, requesting lists of potential
recruits, and suggesting names. Ms. Clarke’s team wrote summaries describing
their backgrounds, business affiliations and where they stood on the war.
“Rumsfeld ultimately cleared off on all invitees,” said Mr. Krueger, who left
the Pentagon in 2004. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment for
this article.)
Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, although some
participated only briefly or sporadically. The largest contingent was affiliated
with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable
outlets. But analysts from CBS and ABC were included, too. Some recruits, though
not on any network payroll, were influential in other ways — either because they
were sought out by radio hosts, or because they often published op-ed articles
or were quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers. At least nine of them
have written op-ed articles for The Times.
The group was heavily represented by men involved in the business of helping
companies win military contracts. Several held senior positions with contractors
that gave them direct responsibility for winning new Pentagon business. James
Marks, a retired Army general and analyst for CNN from 2004 to 2007, pursued
military and intelligence contracts as a senior executive with McNeil
Technologies. Still others held board positions with military firms that gave
them responsibility for government business. General McInerney, the Fox analyst,
for example, sits on the boards of several military contractors, including
Nortel Government Solutions, a supplier of communication networks.
Several were defense industry lobbyists, such as Dr. McCausland, who works at
Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, a major lobbying firm where he is director of a
national security team that represents several military contractors. “We offer
clients access to key decision makers,” Dr. McCausland’s team promised on the
firm’s Web site.
Dr. McCausland was not the only analyst making this pledge. Another was Joseph
W. Ralston, a retired Air Force general. Soon after signing on with CBS, General
Ralston was named vice chairman of the Cohen Group, a consulting firm headed by
a former defense secretary, William Cohen, himself now a “world affairs” analyst
for CNN. “The Cohen Group knows that getting to ‘yes’ in the aerospace and
defense market — whether in the United States or abroad — requires that
companies have a thorough, up-to-date understanding of the thinking of
government decision makers,” the company tells prospective clients on its Web
site.
There were also ideological ties.
Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A.
Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq,
an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make
the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had their own consulting
firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.
Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that
pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there
was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.
This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst
from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological
warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news
organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during
Vietnam.
“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out
Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological
operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but
domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and
radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”
The Selling
of the War
From their earliest sessions with the military analysts, Mr. Rumsfeld and his
aides spoke as if they were all part of the same team.
In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the
uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best government
china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the
solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm
thank you notes from the secretary himself.
“Oh, you have no idea,” Mr. Allard said, describing the effect. “You’re back.
They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV.” It was, he said, “psyops
on steroids” — a nuanced exercise in influence through flattery and proximity.
“It’s not like it’s, ‘We’ll pay you $500 to get our story out,’ ” he said. “It’s
more subtle.”
The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote
their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.
In the fall and winter leading up to the invasion, the Pentagon armed its
analysts with talking points portraying Iraq as an urgent threat. The basic case
became a familiar mantra: Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, was
developing nuclear weapons, and might one day slip some to Al Qaeda; an invasion
would be a relatively quick and inexpensive “war of liberation.”
At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke’s staff marveled at the way the analysts
seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was
their own.
“You could see that they were messaging,” Mr. Krueger said. “You could see they
were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical
specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.” Some
days, he added, “We were able to click on every single station and every one of
our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say,
‘This is working.’ ”
On April 12, 2003, with major combat almost over, Mr. Rumsfeld drafted a
memorandum to Ms. Clarke. “Let’s think about having some of the folks who did
such a good job as talking heads in after this thing is over,” he wrote.
By summer, though, the first signs of the insurgency had emerged. Reports from
journalists based in Baghdad were increasingly suffused with the imagery of
mayhem.
The Pentagon did not have to search far for a counterweight.
It was time, an internal Pentagon strategy memorandum urged, to “re-energize
surrogates and message-force multipliers,” starting with the military analysts.
The memorandum led to a proposal to take analysts on a tour of Iraq in September
2003, timed to help overcome the sticker shock from Mr. Bush’s request for $87
billion in emergency war financing.
The group included four analysts from Fox News, one each from CNN and ABC, and
several research-group luminaries whose opinion articles appear regularly in the
nation’s op-ed pages.
The trip invitation promised a look at “the real situation on the ground in
Iraq.”
The situation, as described in scores of books, was deteriorating. L. Paul
Bremer III, then the American viceroy in Iraq, wrote in his memoir, “My Year in
Iraq,” that he had privately warned the White House that the United States had
“about half the number of soldiers we needed here.”
“We’re up against a growing and sophisticated threat,” Mr. Bremer recalled
telling the president during a private White House dinner.
That dinner took place on Sept. 24, while the analysts were touring Iraq.
Yet these harsh realities were elided, or flatly contradicted, during the
official presentations for the analysts, records show. The itinerary, scripted
to the minute, featured brief visits to a model school, a few refurbished
government buildings, a center for women’s rights, a mass grave and even the
gardens of Babylon.
Mostly the analysts attended briefings. These sessions, records show, spooled
out an alternative narrative, depicting an Iraq bursting with political and
economic energy, its security forces blossoming. On the crucial question of
troop levels, the briefings echoed the White House line: No reinforcements were
needed. The “growing and sophisticated threat” described by Mr. Bremer was
instead depicted as degraded, isolated and on the run.
“We’re winning,” a briefing document proclaimed.
One trip participant, General Nash of ABC, said some briefings were so clearly
“artificial” that he joked to another group member that they were on “the George
Romney memorial trip to Iraq,” a reference to Mr. Romney’s infamous claim that
American officials had “brainwashed” him into supporting the Vietnam War during
a tour there in 1965, while he was governor of Michigan.
But if the trip pounded the message of progress, it also represented a business
opportunity: direct access to the most senior civilian and military leaders in
Iraq and Kuwait, including many with a say in how the president’s $87 billion
would be spent. It also was a chance to gather inside information about the most
pressing needs confronting the American mission: the acute shortages of
“up-armored” Humvees; the billions to be spent building military bases; the
urgent need for interpreters; and the ambitious plans to train Iraq’s security
forces.
Information and access of this nature had undeniable value for trip participants
like William V. Cowan and Carlton A. Sherwood.
Mr. Cowan, a Fox analyst and retired Marine colonel, was the chief executive of
a new military firm, the wvc3 Group. Mr. Sherwood was its executive vice
president. At the time, the company was seeking contracts worth tens of millions
to supply body armor and counterintelligence services in Iraq. In addition, wvc3
Group had a written agreement to use its influence and connections to help
tribal leaders in Al Anbar Province win reconstruction contracts from the
coalition.
“Those sheiks wanted access to the C.P.A.,” Mr. Cowan recalled in an interview,
referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Mr. Cowan said he pleaded their cause during the trip. “I tried to push hard
with some of Bremer’s people to engage these people of Al Anbar,” he said.
Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip
translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip.
One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing
inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of
the Iraqi security forces were withering. “They can’t shoot, but then again,
they don’t,” one officer told them, according to one participant’s notes.
“I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General Vallely, one
of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.
The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.
“You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News
upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be “down to a few numbers”
within months.
“We could not be more excited, more pleased,” Mr. Cowan told Greta Van Susteren
of Fox News. There was barely a word about armor shortages or corrupt Iraqi
security forces. And on the key strategic question of the moment — whether to
send more troops — the analysts were unanimous.
“I am so much against adding more troops,” General Shepperd said on CNN.
Access and
Influence
Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a masterpiece
in the management of perceptions, not least because it gave fuel to complaints
that “mainstream” journalists were ignoring the good news in Iraq.
“We’re hitting a home run on this trip,” a senior Pentagon official wrote in an
e-mail message to Richard B. Myers and Peter Pace, then chairman and vice
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Its success only intensified the Pentagon’s campaign. The pace of briefings
accelerated. More trips were organized. Eventually the effort involved officials
from Washington to Baghdad to Kabul to Guantánamo and back to Tampa, Fla., the
headquarters of United States Central Command.
The scale reflected strong support from the top. When officials in Iraq were
slow to organize another trip for analysts, a Pentagon official fired off an
e-mail message warning that the trips “have the highest levels of visibility” at
the White House and urging them to get moving before Lawrence Di Rita, one of
Mr. Rumsfeld’s closest aides, “picks up the phone and starts calling the
4-stars.”
Mr. Di Rita, no longer at the Defense Department, said in an interview that a
“conscious decision” was made to rely on the military analysts to counteract
“the increasingly negative view of the war” coming from journalists in Iraq. The
analysts, he said, generally had “a more supportive view” of the administration
and the war, and the combination of their TV platforms and military cachet made
them ideal for rebutting critical coverage of issues like troop morale,
treatment of detainees, inadequate equipment or poorly trained Iraqi security
forces. “On those issues, they were more likely to be seen as credible
spokesmen,” he said.
For analysts with military industry ties, the attention brought access to a
widening circle of influential officials beyond the contacts they had
accumulated over the course of their careers.
Charles T. Nash, a Fox military analyst and retired Navy captain, is a
consultant who helps small companies break into the military market. Suddenly,
he had entree to a host of senior military leaders, many of whom he had never
met. It was, he said, like being embedded with the Pentagon leadership. “You
start to recognize what’s most important to them,” he said, adding, “There’s
nothing like seeing stuff firsthand.”
Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed
their special access as a business advantage. “Of course we realized that,” Mr.
Krueger said. “We weren’t naïve about that.”
They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their
analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the “hit,” the number of times they
appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from
high-level Pentagon “sources,” the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the
greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several
analysts prominently advertised their network roles.
“They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level,”
Mr. Krueger said. “This has been highly honed.”
Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their
access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this
dynamic. “That’s not something that ever crossed my mind,” he said. In any
event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for
any ethical complications. “We assume they know where the lines are,” he said.
The analysts met personally with Mr. Rumsfeld at least 18 times, records show,
but that was just the beginning. They had dozens more sessions with the most
senior members of his brain trust and access to officials responsible for
managing the billions being spent in Iraq. Other groups of “key influentials”
had meetings, but not nearly as often as the analysts.
An internal memorandum in 2005 helped explain why. The memorandum, written by a
Pentagon official who had accompanied analysts to Iraq, said that based on her
observations during the trip, the analysts “are having a greater impact” on
network coverage of the military. “They have now become the go-to guys not only
on breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues,” she wrote.
Other branches of the administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr.
Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that
the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without
warrants, Pentagon records show. When David H. Petraeus was appointed the
commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet
with the analysts.
“We knew we had extraordinary access,” said Timur J. Eads, a retired Army
lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations
for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.
Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he had at times held his tongue on
television for fear that “some four-star could call up and say, ‘Kill that
contract.’ ” For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts
about the progress of Iraq’s security forces. “I know a snow job when I see
one,” he said. He did not share this on TV.
“Human nature,” he explained, though he noted other instances when he was
critical.
Some analysts said that even before the war started, they privately had
questions about the justification for the invasion, but were careful not to
express them on air.
Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in
early 2003 about Iraq’s purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled
asking the briefer whether the United States had “smoking gun” proof.
“ ‘We don’t have any hard evidence,’ ” Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer
replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. “We are
looking at ourselves saying, ‘What are we doing?’ ”
Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works
in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and
recalled feeling “very disappointed” after being shown satellite photographs
purporting to show bunkers associated with a hidden weapons program. Mr.
Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being “manipulated” to convey
a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr.
Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any
misgivings with the American public.
Mr. Bevelacqua and another Fox analyst, Mr. Cowan, had formed the wvc3 Group,
and hoped to win military and national security contracts.
“There’s no way I was going to go down that road and get completely torn apart,”
Mr. Bevelacqua said. “You’re talking about fighting a huge machine.”
Some e-mail messages between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit
trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert H. Scales Jr., a
retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose
consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in
Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in
2006.
“Recall the stuff I did after my last visit,” he wrote. “I will do the same this
time.”
Pentagon
Keeps Tabs
As it happened, the analysts’ news media appearances were being closely
monitored. The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds
of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it
a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in
Montana, circulation 20,000.
Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding
experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005,
offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the
networks.
“Commentary from all three Iraq trips was extremely positive over all,” the
report concluded.
In interviews, several analysts reacted with dismay when told they were
described as reliable “surrogates” in Pentagon documents. And some asserted that
their Pentagon sessions were, as David L. Grange, a retired Army general and CNN
analyst put it, “just upfront information,” while others pointed out,
accurately, that they did not always agree with the administration or each
other. “None of us drink the Kool-Aid,” General Scales said.
Likewise, several also denied using their special access for business gain. “Not
related at all,” General Shepperd said, pointing out that many in the Pentagon
held CNN “in the lowest esteem.”
Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts
told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes
after being on the air.
On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had
grown increasingly uncomfortable with the “twisted version of reality” being
pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give “a heads-up” that
some of his comments on Fox “may not all be friendly,” Pentagon records show.
Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet
when he told Bill O’Reilly that the United States was “not on a good glide path
right now” in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.
Mr. Cowan said he was “precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this
appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, “simply didn’t like the
fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.” The next day James T. Conway, then
director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference
call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines’
deaths further erode support for the war.
“The strategic target remains our population,” General Conway said. “We can lose
people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What
they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can
help us not let that happen.”
“General, I just made that point on the air,” an analyst replied.
“Let’s work it together, guys,” General Conway urged.
The
Generals’ Revolt
The full dimensions of this mutual embrace were perhaps never clearer than in
April 2006, after several of Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals — none of them
network military analysts — went public with devastating critiques of his
wartime performance. Some called for his resignation.
On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the “Generals’ Revolt”
dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts
to a meeting with him early the next week, records show. When an aide urged a
short delay to “give our big guys on the West Coast a little more time to buy a
ticket and get here,” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office insisted that “the boss” wanted the
meeting fast “for impact on the current story.”
That same day, Pentagon officials helped two Fox analysts, General McInerney and
General Vallely, write an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal defending
Mr. Rumsfeld.
“Starting to write it now,” General Vallely wrote to the Pentagon that
afternoon. “Any input for the article,” he added a little later, “will be much
appreciated.” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office quickly forwarded talking points and
statistics to rebut the notion of a spreading revolt.
“Vallely is going to use the numbers,” a Pentagon official reported that
afternoon.
The standard secrecy notwithstanding, plans for this session leaked, producing a
front-page story in The Times that Sunday. In damage-control mode, Pentagon
officials scrambled to present the meeting as routine and directed that
communications with analysts be kept “very formal,” records show. “This is very,
very sensitive now,” a Pentagon official warned subordinates.
On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr.
Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared
determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war.
“I’m an old intel guy,” said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers’
names.) “And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is
Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, ‘Oh my God, they’re trying
to brainwash.’ ”
“What are you, some kind of a nut?” Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. “You
don’t believe in the Constitution?”
There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr.
Rumsfeld’s former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was
rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administration’s
overall war strategy, they counseled, was “brilliant” and “very successful.”
“Frankly,” one participant said, “from a military point of view, the penalty,
2,400 brave Americans whom we lost, 3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is
relative.”
An analyst said at another point: “This is a wider war. And whether we have
democracy in Iraq or not, it doesn’t mean a tinker’s damn if we end up with the
result we want, which is a regime over there that’s not a threat to us.”
“Yeah,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, taking notes.
But winning or not, they bluntly warned, the administration was in grave
political danger so long as most Americans viewed Iraq as a lost cause. “America
hates a loser,” one analyst said.
Much of the session was devoted to ways that Mr. Rumsfeld could reverse the
“political tide.” One analyst urged Mr. Rumsfeld to “just crush these people,”
and assured him that “most of the gentlemen at the table” would enthusiastically
support him if he did.
“You are the leader,” the analyst told Mr. Rumsfeld. “You are our guy.”
At another point, an analyst made a suggestion: “In one of your speeches you
ought to say, ‘Everybody stop for a minute and imagine an Iraq ruled by
Zarqawi.’ And then you just go down the list and say, ‘All right, we’ve got oil,
money, sovereignty, access to the geographic center of gravity of the Middle
East, blah, blah, blah.’ If you can just paint a mental picture for Joe America
to say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t imagine a world like that.’ ”
Even as they assured Mr. Rumsfeld that they stood ready to help in this public
relations offensive, the analysts sought guidance on what they should cite as
the next “milestone” that would, as one analyst put it, “keep the American
people focused on the idea that we’re moving forward to a positive end.” They
placed particular emphasis on the growing confrontation with Iran.
“When you said ‘long war,’ you changed the psyche of the American people to
expect this to be a generational event,” an analyst said. “And again, I’m not
trying to tell you how to do your job...”
“Get in line,” Mr. Rumsfeld interjected.
The meeting ended and Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing pleased and relaxed, took the
entire group into a small study and showed off treasured keepsakes from his
life, several analysts recalled.
Soon after, analysts hit the airwaves. The Omnitec monitoring reports,
circulated to more than 80 officials, confirmed that analysts repeated many of
the Pentagon’s talking points: that Mr. Rumsfeld consulted “frequently and
sufficiently” with his generals; that he was not “overly concerned” with the
criticisms; that the meeting focused “on more important topics at hand,”
including the next milestone in Iraq, the formation of a new government.
Days later, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum distilling their collective guidance
into bullet points. Two were underlined:
“Focus on the Global War on Terror — not simply Iraq. The wider war — the long
war.”
“Link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern. If we fail in Iraq or Afghanistan, it
will help Iran.”
But if Mr. Rumsfeld found the session instructive, at least one participant,
General Nash, the ABC analyst, was repulsed.
“I walked away from that session having total disrespect for my fellow
commentators, with perhaps one or two exceptions,” he said.
View From
the Networks
Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress
about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.
Mr. Garrett, the Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General
Petraeus during the call to “keep up the great work.”
“Hey,” Mr. Garrett said in an interview, “anything we can do to help.”
For the moment, though, because of heavy election coverage and general war
fatigue, military analysts are not getting nearly as much TV time, and the
networks have trimmed their rosters of analysts. The conference call with
General Petraeus, for example, produced little in the way of immediate coverage.
Still, almost weekly the Pentagon continues to conduct briefings with selected
military analysts. Many analysts said network officials were only dimly aware of
these interactions. The networks, they said, have little grasp of how often they
meet with senior officials, or what is discussed.
“I don’t think NBC was even aware we were participating,” said Rick Francona, a
longtime military analyst for the network.
Some networks publish biographies on their Web sites that describe their
analysts’ military backgrounds and, in some cases, give at least limited
information about their business ties. But many analysts also said the networks
asked few questions about their outside business interests, the nature of their
work or the potential for that work to create conflicts of interest. “None of
that ever happened,” said Mr. Allard, an NBC analyst until 2006.
“The worst conflict of interest was no interest.”
Mr. Allard and other analysts said their network handlers also raised no
objections when the Defense Department began paying their commercial airfare for
Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq — a clear ethical violation for most news
organizations.
CBS News declined to comment on what it knew about its military analysts’
business affiliations or what steps it took to guard against potential
conflicts.
NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures for hiring and monitoring
military analysts. The network issued a short statement: “We have clear policies
in place to assure that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately
vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a
conflict of interest.”
Jeffrey W. Schneider, a spokesman for ABC, said that while the network’s
military consultants were not held to the same ethical rules as its full-time
journalists, they were expected to keep the network informed about any outside
business entanglements. “We make it clear to them we expect them to keep us
closely apprised,” he said.
A spokeswoman for Fox News said executives “refused to participate” in this
article.
CNN requires its military analysts to disclose in writing all outside sources of
income. But like the other networks, it does not provide its military analysts
with the kind of written, specific ethical guidelines it gives its full-time
employees for avoiding real or apparent conflicts of interest.
Yet even where controls exist, they have sometimes proven porous.
CNN, for example, said it was unaware for nearly three years that one of its
main military analysts, General Marks, was deeply involved in the business of
seeking government contracts, including contracts related to Iraq.
General Marks was hired by CNN in 2004, about the time he took a management
position at McNeil Technologies, where his job was to pursue military and
intelligence contracts. As required, General Marks disclosed that he received
income from McNeil Technologies. But the disclosure form did not require him to
describe what his job entailed, and CNN acknowledges it failed to do additional
vetting.
“We did not ask Mr. Marks the follow-up questions we should have,” CNN said in a
written statement.
In an interview, General Marks said it was no secret at CNN that his job at
McNeil Technologies was about winning contracts. “I mean, that’s what McNeil
does,” he said.
CNN, however, said it did not know the nature of McNeil’s military business or
what General Marks did for the company. If he was bidding on Pentagon contracts,
CNN said, that should have disqualified him from being a military analyst for
the network. But in the summer and fall of 2006, even as he was regularly asked
to comment on conditions in Iraq, General Marks was working intensively on
bidding for a $4.6 billion contract to provide thousands of translators to
United States forces in Iraq. In fact, General Marks was made president of the
McNeil spin-off that won the huge contract in December 2006.
General Marks said his work on the contract did not affect his commentary on
CNN. “I’ve got zero challenge separating myself from a business interest,” he
said.
But CNN said it had no idea about his role in the contract until July 2007, when
it reviewed his most recent disclosure form, submitted months earlier, and
finally made inquiries about his new job.
“We saw the extent of his dealings and determined at that time we should end our
relationship with him,” CNN said.
Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand, NYT,
20.4.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/washington/20generals.html?hp
Pentagon
Is Expected to Close Intelligence Unit
April 2,
2008
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON
— The Pentagon is expected to shut a controversial intelligence office that has
drawn fire from lawmakers and civil liberties groups who charge that it was part
of an effort by the Defense Department to expand into domestic spying.
The move, government officials say, is part of a broad effort under Defense
Secretary Robert M. Gates to review, overhaul and, in some cases, dismantle an
intelligence architecture built by his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld.
The intelligence unit, called the Counterintelligence Field Activity office, was
created by Mr. Rumsfeld after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as part of
an effort to counter the operations of foreign intelligence services and terror
groups inside the United States and abroad.
Yet the office, whose size and budget is classified, came under fierce criticism
in 2005 after it was disclosed that it was managing a database that included
information about antiwar protests planned at churches, schools and Quaker
meeting halls.
The Pentagon’s senior intelligence official, James R. Clapper, has recommended
to Mr. Gates that the counterintelligence field office be dismantled and that
some of its operations be placed under the authority of the Defense Intelligence
Agency, the government officials said.
Pentagon officials said Mr. Gates had yet to approve the recommendation.
Mr. Gates, a former director of central intelligence, has promised to improve
coordination of the Pentagon’s intelligence collection with other spy agencies
and help rebuild some of the relationships bruised under Mr. Rumsfeld’s tenure.
Mr. Rumsfeld and some of his aides had expressed deep suspicion toward the
Central Intelligence Agency in particular, and some people accused Mr. Rumsfeld
of trying to build an intelligence empire of his own.
Shortly after taking over the Pentagon last year, Mr. Gates ordered a broad
review of its intelligence operations and of the Defense Department’s
relationships with other spy agencies.
It is unclear whether Mr. Clapper is also recommending tighter restrictions on
Pentagon counterterrorism and counterespionage operations in the United States.
Some civil liberties groups said they worried that the change might be cosmetic
and that the Pentagon might be closing the office to farm out its operations to
other agencies that receive less scrutiny.
Lt. Col. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said the recommendation to close
the office had nothing to do with its troubled history. The move is aimed,
Colonel Ryder said, at “creating efficiencies and streamlining” Pentagon efforts
to thwart operations by foreign intelligence services and terror networks.
Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas and chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee, called the decision long overdue.
Mr. Reyes said the office “was a Rumsfeld-era relic that triggered major concern
about domestic intelligence gathering by the Pentagon against Americans.”
The work of coordinating the Pentagon’s various counterintelligence activities
would remain important, Mr. Reyes said, but “vigorous oversight” would be needed
under the new structure.
Some current and former Pentagon officials expressed concern that putting the
mission of countering foreign intelligence services under the Defense
Intelligence Agency could signal a decline in its priority. But Colonel Ryder,
the Pentagon spokesman, said the recommendation to close the counterintelligence
office was intended to strengthen counterintelligence operations.
Pentagon officials said that the database that housed information about the war
protesters was built to track terrorist threats against domestic military bases
and that reports about war protesters were put into it by mistake. Mr. Clapper
ordered an end to the database, called Talon, last year.
The disclosure that the Pentagon was collecting information about citizens in
the United States prompted memories of its activities decades ago, when the
military used electronic surveillance to monitor civilians protesting the
Vietnam War. The Pentagon is traditionally barred from conducting domestic
intelligence operations.
The counterintelligence office was also brought into the scandal surrounding
Representative Randy Cunningham, a California Republican, who resigned from
Congress in 2005 after pleading guilty to taking bribes from military
contractors. Some of the contracts that Mr. Cunningham channeled to Mitchell J.
Wade, a longtime friend, were for programs of the counterintelligence office.
Newly declassified documents released on Tuesday shed more light on another
activity coordinated by the Pentagon’s counterintelligence office, issuing
letters to banks and credit agencies to obtain financial records in terrorism
and espionage investigations.
The Pentagon has issued hundreds of so-called national security letters, which
are noncompulsory, as a tool to examine the income of employees suspected of
collaborating with a foreign spy service or international terrorist network.
The documents, released as part of a Freedom of Information lawsuit brought by
the American Civil Liberties Union, include an internal review begun in 2007
that examined the Pentagon’s use of the letters. The review found poor
coordination and a lack of standardized training inside the Defense Department
about using the letters, but uncovered no instances where the department broke
any laws.
The Pentagon is authorized to issue the letters, sometimes in coordination with
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to obtain financial records of civilian and
military Defense Department employees and their families.
Colonel Ryder said that since the Sept. 11 attacks there had been six cases
where the letters were used to obtain records about the family members of
Defense Department employees.
Pentagon Is Expected to Close Intelligence Unit, NYT,
2.4.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/washington/02intel.html
Inside
the Black Budget
April 1,
2008
The New York Times
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Skulls.
Black cats. A naked woman riding a killer whale. Grim reapers. Snakes. Swords.
Occult symbols. A wizard with a staff that shoots lightning bolts. Moons. Stars.
A dragon holding the Earth in its claws.
No, this is not the fantasy world of a 12-year-old boy.
It is, according to a new book, part of the hidden reality behind the Pentagon’s
classified, or “black,” budget that delivers billions of dollars to stealthy
armies of high-tech warriors. The book offers a glimpse of this dark world
through a revealing lens — patches — the kind worn on military uniforms.
“It’s a fresh approach to secret government,” Steven Aftergood, a security
expert at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, said in an
interview. “It shows that these secret programs have their own culture,
vocabulary and even sense of humor.”
One patch shows a space alien with huge eyes holding a stealth bomber near its
mouth. “To Serve Man” reads the text above, a reference to a classic “Twilight
Zone” episode in which man is the entree, not the customer. “Gustatus Similis
Pullus” reads the caption below, dog Latin for “Tastes Like Chicken.”
Military officials and experts said the patches are real if often unofficial
efforts at building team spirit.
The classified budget of the Defense Department, concealed from the public in
all but outline, has nearly doubled in the Bush years, to $32 billion. That is
more than the combined budgets of the Food and Drug Administration, the National
Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Those billions have expanded a secret world of advanced science and technology
in which military units and federal contractors push back the frontiers of
warfare. In the past, such handiwork has produced some of the most advanced
jets, weapons and spy satellites, as well as notorious boondoggles.
Budget documents tell little. This year, for instance, the Pentagon says Program
Element 0603891c is receiving $196 million but will disclose nothing about what
the project does. Private analysts say it apparently aims at developing space
weapons.
Trevor Paglen, an artist and photographer finishing his Ph.D. in geography at
the University of California, Berkeley, has managed to document some of this
hidden world. The 75 patches he has assembled reveal a bizarre mix of high and
low culture where Latin and Greek mottos frame images of spooky demons and sexy
warriors, of dragons dropping bombs and skunks firing laser beams.
“Oderint Dum Metuant,” reads a patch for an Air Force program that mines spy
satellite images for battlefield intelligence, according to Mr. Paglen, who
identifies the saying as from Caligula, the first-century Roman emperor famed
for his depravity. It translates “Let them hate so long as they fear.”
Wizards appear on several patches. The one hurling lightning bolts comes from a
secret Air Force base at Groom Lake, northwest of Las Vegas in a secluded
valley. Mr. Paglen identifies its five clustered stars and one separate star as
a veiled reference to Area 51, where the government tests advanced aircraft and,
U.F.O. buffs say, captured alien spaceships.
The book offers not only clues into the nature of the secret programs, but also
a glimpse of zealous male bonding among the presumed elite of the
military-industrial complex. The patches often feel like fraternity pranks gone
ballistic.
The book’s title? “I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by
Me,” published by Melville House. Mr. Paglen says the title is the Latin
translation of a patch designed for the Navy Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 4,
at Point Mugu, Calif. Its mission, he says, is to test strike aircraft,
conventional weapons and electronic warfare equipment and to develop tactics to
use the high-tech armaments in war.
“The military has patches for almost everything it does,” Mr. Paglen writes in
the introduction. “Including, curiously, for programs, units and activities that
are officially secret.”
He said contractors in some cases made the patches to build esprit de corps.
Other times, he added, military units produced them informally, in contrast to
official patches.
Mr. Paglen said he found them by touring bases, noting what personnel wore,
joining alumni associations, interviewing active and former team members,
talking to base historians and filing requests under the Freedom of Information
Act.
A spokesman for the Pentagon, Cmdr. Bob Mehal, said it would be imprudent to
comment on “which patches do or do not represent classified units.” In an e-mail
message, Commander Mehal added, “It would be supposition to suggest ‘anyone’ is
uncomfortable with this book.”
Each year, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a private group
in Washington, publishes an update on the Pentagon’s classified budget. It says
the money began to soar after the two events of Mr. Bush’s coming into office
and terrorists’ 9/11 attacks.
What sparked his interest, Mr. Paglen recalled, were Vice President Dick
Cheney’s remarks as the Pentagon and World Trade Center smoldered. On “Meet the
Press,” he said the nation would engage its “dark side” to find the attackers
and justice. “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows,” Mr. Cheney said. “It’s
going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve
our objective.”
In an interview, Mr. Paglen said that remark revived memories of his childhood
when his military family traveled the globe to bases often involved in secret
missions. “I’d go out drinking with Special Forces guys,” he recalled. “I was
15, and they were 20, and they could never say where they where coming from or
what they were doing. You were just around the stuff.”
Intrigued by Mr. Cheney’s remarks as well as his own recollections, Mr. Paglen
set off to map the secret world and document its expansion. He traveled widely
across the Southwest, where the military keeps many secret bases. His labors, he
said, resulted in his Ph.D. thesis as well as a book, “Blank Spots on a Map,”
that Dutton plans to publish next year.
The research also led to another book, “Torture Taxi,” that Melville House
published in 2006. It described how spies kidnapped and detained suspected
terrorists around the globe.
“Black World,” a 2006 display of his photographs at Bellwether, a gallery in
Chelsea, showed “anonymous-looking buildings in parched landscapes shot through
a shimmering heat haze,” Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times, adding that
the images “seem to emit a buzz of mystery as they turn military surveillance
inside out: here the surveillant is surveilled.”
In this research, Mr. Paglen became fascinated by the patches and started
collecting them and displaying them at talks and shows. He said a breakthrough
occurred around 2004, when he visited Peter Merlin, an “aerospace archaeologist”
who works in the Mojave Desert not far from a sprawling military base. Mr.
Merlin argued that the lightning bolts, stars and other symbols could be
substantive clues about unit numbers and operating locations, as well as the
purpose of hidden programs.
“These symbols,” Mr. Paglen wrote, “were a language. If you could begin to learn
its grammar, you could get a glimpse into the secret world itself.”
His book explores this idea and seeks to decode the symbols. Many patches show
the Greek letter sigma, which Mr. Paglen identifies as a technical term for how
well an object reflects radar waves, a crucial parameter in developing stealthy
jets.
A patch from a Groom Lake unit shows the letter sigma with the “buster” slash
running through it, as in the movie “Ghost Busters.” “Huge Deposit — No Return”
reads its caption. Huge Deposit, Mr. Paglen writes, “indicates the bomb load
deposited by the bomber on its target, while ‘No Return’ refers to the absence
of a radar return, meaning the aircraft was undetectable to radar.”
In an interview, Mr. Paglen said his favorite patch was the dragon holding the
Earth in its claws, its wings made of American flags and its mouth wide open,
baring its fangs. He said it came from the National Reconnaissance Office, which
oversees developing spy satellites. “There’s something both belligerent and
weirdly self-critical about it,” he remarked. “It’s representing the U.S. as a
dragon with the whole world in its clutches.”
The field is expanding. Dwayne A. Day and Roger Guillemette, military
historians, wrote an article published this year in The Space Review
(www.thespacereview.com/article/1033/1) on patches from secret space programs.
“It’s neat stuff,” Dr. Day said in an interview. “They’re not really giving away
secrets. But the patches do go farther than the organizations want to go
officially.”
Mr. Paglen plans to keep mining the patches and the field of clandestine
military activity. “It’s kind of remarkable,” he said. “This stuff is a huge
industry, I mean a huge industry. And it’s remarkable that you can develop these
projects on an industrial scale, and we don’t know what they are. It’s an
astounding feat of social engineering.”
Inside the Black Budget, NYT, 1.4.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/science/01patc.html?8dpc
Stealth
Bomber Crashes in Guam
February
24, 2008
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
HAGATNA,
Guam (AP) — A B-2 stealth bomber crashed Saturday shortly after taking off from
Anderson Air Force Base in Guam.
The crash was the first for a B-2, said Capt. Sheila Johnston, a spokeswoman for
Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.
Both pilots ejected safely. There were no injuries on the ground or damage to
buildings, and no munitions were on board.
The aircraft was one of four leaving Guam after a four-month deployment as part
of a continuous American bomber presence in the western Pacific.
After the crash, which happened at 10:30 a.m., the three other bombers were
being kept on Guam, said Maj. Eric Hilliard at Hickham Air Force Base in Hawaii.
One B-2 that had taken off safely was called back.
The Air Force did not identify the pilots but said one was medically evaluated
and released and the other was in stable condition at Guam Naval Hospital.
A board of officers will investigate the cause of the crash.
Each B-2 bomber costs about $1.2 billion. All are based at Whiteman Air Force
Base in Missouri, but the Air Force has been rotating several through Guam since
2004, along with B-1 and B-52 bombers.
The rotations are designed to support American security in the Asia-Pacific
region while other military forces are diverted to the Middle East.
Stealth Bomber Crashes in Guam, NYT, 24.2.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/us/24crash.html
Pentagon
Says It’s Confident Missile Hit Satellite Tank
February
21, 2008
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON
— Just hours after a Navy missile interceptor struck a dying spy satellite
orbiting 130 miles over the Pacific Ocean, a senior military officer expressed
high confidence early Thursday that a tank filled with toxic rocket fuel had
been breached.
Video of the unusual operation showed the missile leaving a bright trail as it
streaked toward the satellite, and then a flash, a fireball, a plume and a cloud
as the interceptor, at a minimum, appeared to have found its target, a satellite
that went dead shortly after being launched in 2006.
“We’re very confident that we hit the satellite,” said Gen. James E. Cartwright
of the Marines, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We also have a high
degree of confidence that we got the tank.”
General Cartwright cautioned that despite visual and spectral evidence that the
hydrazine rocket fuel had been dispersed, it could take 24 to 48 hours before
the Pentagon could announce with full confidence that the mission was a success.
Even so, he said the military had 80 to 90 percent confidence the fuel tank was
breached.
The fuel tank aboard the satellite was believed strong enough to survive the
fiery re-entry through the atmosphere, and officials expressed concerns that the
toxic fuel could pose a hazard to populated areas.
General Cartwright said debris from the strike, with individual pieces no larger
than a football, already had begun to re-enter the atmosphere. Most, he said,
was predicted to fall into the ocean.
Even so, the State Department was alerting American embassies around the world
so they could keep their host governments informed, and the Federal Emergency
Management Agency had put out instructions to first responders across the United
States about steps to take should hazardous debris fall in populated areas.
The first international reaction came from China, where the government objected
on Thursday to the American missile strike, warning that the United States
Navy’s action could threaten security in outer space.
Liu Jianchao, the Chinese foreign ministry’s spokesman, said at a news
conference in Beijing that the United States should also share data promptly
about what will become of the remaining pieces of the satellite, which are
expected to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and mostly burn up in the next two
days.
“China is continuously following closely the possible harm caused by the U.S.
action to outer space security and relevant countries,” Mr. Liu said, according
to the Associated Press. “China requests the U.S. to fulfill its international
obligations in real earnest and provide to the international community necessary
information and relevant data in a timely and prompt way so that relevant
countries can take precautions.”
American officials were critical of China last year for using an anti-satellite
weapon to destroy a satellite in a much higher orbit in January 2007 and then
refusing to confirm the test for nearly two weeks. The Chinese test produced
1,600 pieces of debris that are expected to orbit the Earth for years,
preventing other spacecraft from using the same or similar orbits.
During a Pentagon news conference Thursday morning, General Cartwright rebuffed
those who said the mission was, at least in part, organized to showcase American
missile defense or anti-satellite capabilities.
He said the missile itself had to be reconfigured from its task of tracking and
hitting an adversary’s warhead to instead find a cold, tumbling satellite. “This
was a one-time modification,” General Cartwright said.
Sensors from the American missile defense system were an important part of this
mission, though, he said.
He stressed that “the intent here was to preserve human life,” but also
acknowledged that “the technical degree of difficulty was significant” and the
accomplishment earned cheers from personnel in command centers across the
military, as well.
Completing a mission in which an interceptor designed for missile defense was
used for the first time to attack a satellite, the Lake Erie, an Aegis-class
cruiser, fired a single missile just before 10:30 p.m. Eastern time, and the
missile hit the satellite as it traveled at more than 17,000 miles per hour, the
Pentagon said in its official announcement.
“A network of land-, air-, sea- and spaced-based sensors confirms that the U.S.
military intercepted a nonfunctioning National Reconnaissance Office satellite
which was in its final orbits before entering the Earth’s atmosphere,” the
statement said.
By early Wednesday, three Navy warships were in position in the Pacific Ocean to
launch the interceptors and to track the mission.
Radar and other tracking equipment, both in space and on the ground, were
monitored at Vandenberg Air Force Base, in California, and at a space command
headquarters in Colorado Springs, with control of the operation managed by the
Strategic Command in Omaha, Neb.
Although the satellite circled the globe every 90 minutes, analysts pinpointed a
single overhead pass each day that would offer the best chance of striking the
satellite and then having half of the debris fall into the atmosphere in the
next three orbits over water or less-populated areas of the Earth.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who left Washington on Wednesday for a week
of meetings in Asia, had been empowered by President Bush to issue the order to
shoot down the satellite and gave the order several hours before the strike.
The many moving parts of a mission to shoot down a dying spy satellite with an
antimissile interceptor were lined up earlier Wednesday after the space shuttle
Atlantis returned to Earth, officials said.
Military officials said their goal had been to carry out the mission before
March 1, when the satellite was expected to start skidding against the upper
reaches of the atmosphere.
That initial friction would bump the satellite into a more unpredictable Earth
orbit, even before it started a fiery descent through the atmosphere.
Providing new information about how the mission would be carried out, a senior
military officer on Wednesday described the vessels, weapons and command
structure for the operation
The senior military officer said the mission would be launched in daylight to
take advantage of radar, heat-sensor tracking and visual tracking equipment. The
Navy had a window that lasted only tens of seconds as the satellite passed
overhead, military officers said.
The Lake Erie has two Standard Missile 3 rockets that were adapted to track the
cold satellite, as opposed to the heated enemy warheads for which it was
designed. A second ship, the destroyer Decatur, had a third missile as backup.
Another Navy destroyer, the Russell, sailed with the convoy for added tracking
capabilities.
The 5,000-pound satellite, roughly the size of a school bus, was managed by the
National Reconnaissance Office and went dead shortly after it was launched in
December 2006.
The FEMA document notes, “Any debris should be considered potentially hazardous,
and first responders should not attempt to pick it up or move it.”
Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
Pentagon Says It’s Confident Missile Hit Satellite Tank,
NYT, 21.2.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/us/21cnd-satellite.html?hp
U.S. to
Attempt to Shoot Down Faulty Satellite
February
15, 2008
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON
— The military will try to shoot down a crippled spy satellite in the next two
weeks, senior officials said Thursday. The officials laid out a high-tech plan
to intercept the satellite over the Pacific just before it tumbles
uncontrollably to Earth carrying toxic fuel.
President Bush ordered the action to prevent any possible contamination from the
hazardous rocket fuel on board, and not out of any concern that parts of the
spacecraft might survive and reveal its secrets, the officials said.
The challenging mission to demolish the satellite on the fringes of space will
rely on an unforeseen use of ship-based weapons developed to defend against
ballistic missile attacks.
The effort will be a real-world test of the nation’s antiballistic missile
systems and its antisatellite abilities, even though the Pentagon said it was
not using the effort to test its most exotic weapons or send a message to any
adversaries.
The ramifications of the operation are diplomatic, as well as military and
scientific, in part because the United States criticized China last year when
Beijing tested an antisatellite system with an old weather satellite as a
target.
The three-ship convoy assigned to the new task will stalk the satellite’s
orbital path across the northern Pacific, tracking the satellite as it circles
the globe 16 times a day. The sensors and weapons in the operation, modified
from antiaircraft defenses for use as a shield against incoming missiles and
installed on Navy cruisers, have been used just in carefully controlled tests.
This time, the target is not an incoming warhead or a dummy test target, but a
doomed experimental satellite the size of a school bus and weighing 5,000
pounds. It died shortly after being launched in December 2006 and contains a
half-ton of hydrazine, a fuel that officials said could burn the lungs and even
be deadly in extended doses.
The tank is believed to be sturdy enough to survive re-entry, based on studies
of the tank that fell to Earth after the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003.
The military and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have
calculated that the best opportunity to shoot down the satellite with an
interceptor missile is just before it re-enters the atmosphere and starts to
tumble and break apart on a random path toward the surface, an opportunity that
begins in three to four days and continues for eight days. At that point, the
debris would be quickly dragged out of orbit.
In many ways, the task resembles shooting down an intercontinental nuclear
missile, although this target is larger, its path is better known and, if a
first shot misses, it will continue to circle the Earth for long enough to allow
a second or even a third try.
The weapon of choice, after modifications that are under way, is the Standard
Missile 3 on Aegis cruisers. The defensive missiles and supporting radar were
being modified and tested to shoot down enemy warheads. So the software is being
reprogrammed to home in on the radar and other signatures of a large satellite
instead of a ballistic missile, officials said.
Although White House, military and NASA officials described the president’s
decision as motivated solely by wanting to avoid a spread of toxic fuel in an
inhabited area, the effort has implications for missile defense and
antisatellite weapons.
“This is all about trying to reduce the danger to human beings,” said James F.
Jeffrey, deputy national security adviser.
The United States has opposed calls for a treaty limiting antisatellite or other
weapons in space. On Thursday, officials promised that the United States would
remain wholly compliant with treaties requiring the notification to other
nations before launching a missile at the disabled satellite.
The American military shot down a satellite in September 1985 in a test of an
antisatellite system under development. In that experiment, an F-15 Eagle
fighter fired a missile.
Gen. James E. Cartwright of the Marines, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, said that if the first missile failed to strike the satellite, an
assessment would be made within days and that two more missiles were ready.
General Cartwright described little downside in trying to destroy the satellite.
“If we fire at the satellite,” he said, “the worst is that we miss. And then we
have a known situation, which is where we are today. If we graze the satellite,
we’re still better off, because likely we’ll still bring it down sooner, and
therefore more predictably. If we hit the hydrazine tank, then we’ve improved
our potential to mitigate that threat. So the regret factor of not acting
clearly outweighed the regret factors of acting.”
Officials said the space shuttle mission that is under way will have ended
before the launching order is given. Although the International Space Station
remains staffed, its orbit is higher than that of the dead satellite.
“We looked very carefully at increased risks to shuttle and station, and broadly
speaking, they are negligible,” said Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator.
Representative Ellen O. Tauscher of California, considered a Democratic Party
expert on missile defense, agreed that the United States had to take
responsibility for any threat posed by the satellite, but warned that the nation
needed to be open in the effort, because it would be a precedent for other
countries.
“Just like our partners in space, we need to be responsible for the risks we
create,” said Ms. Tauscher, chairwoman of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee.
“This can’t be a demonstration of an offensive capability.”
Jeffrey G. Lewis, an arms control specialist at the New America Foundation,
warned that China would cite the intercept to justify its antisatellite test
last year.
“The politics are terrible,” Mr. Lewis said. “It will be used by the Chinese to
excuse their hit-to-kill test. And it really strengthens the perceived link
between antisatellite systems and missile defenses. We will be using a missile
defense system to shoot down a satellite.”
In January 2007, the Chinese fired an SC-19 missile at a target satellite
orbiting 475 miles overhead. About 1,600 pieces of debris, its remnants, were
detected soon after that test.
On Thursday, American officials said there was no comparison between that test
and their plans. The test was at a far higher altitude than the near Earth orbit
of the failing satellite.
Debris from the Chinese test, officials said, may orbit and pose a threat to
space vehicles for decades, and debris from the American satellite, if hit by
the missile, should fall within weeks.
David C. Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists said the American satellite
was far larger than the one that China destroyed. Mr. Wright predicted the
missile strike could produce 100,000 pieces of debris, some smaller than a
marble but still dangerous to vehicles in space.
He agreed with Pentagon projections that most of the debris would fall into the
atmosphere within weeks. But, he said, a risk remained that some debris could be
kicked into a higher orbit. Specialists in spy satellites have speculated that
the problem satellite, managed by the National Reconnaissance Office, is an
experimental imagery device built by Lockheed Martin and launched from
Vandenberg Air Force Base in California aboard a Delta II rocket.
Michael R. Gordon and David Stout contributed reporting.
U.S. to Attempt to Shoot Down Faulty Satellite, NYT,
15.2.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/us/15satellite.html?hp
U.S.
Presents Charges
Against 6 in Sept. 11 Case
February
11, 2008
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
WASHINGTON
— Six Guantánamo detainees who are accused of central roles in the terror
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, will be shown all the evidence against them and will
be afforded the same rights as American soldiers accused of crimes, the Pentagon
said Monday as it announced the charges against them.
Military prosecutors will seek the death penalty for the six Guantánamo
detainees on charges including conspiracy and murder “in violation of the law of
war,” attacking civilians and civilian targets, terrorism and support of
terrorism, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann of the Air Force, legal adviser to the
Defense Department’s Office of Military Commissions, said at a Pentagon news
briefing.
General Hartmann said it would be up to the trial judge how to handle evidence
obtained through controversial interrogation techniques like “waterboarding,” or
simulated drowning. Critics have said the harsh techniques, which are believed
to have been used on several of the defendants, amount to torture.
As expected, the six include Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the former Qaeda operations
chief who has described himself as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, which
killed nearly 3,000 people.
“The accused are, and will remain, innocent unless proved guilty beyond a
reasonable doubt,” General Hartmann said.
Altogether, the defendants and others not yet charged are believed to have
committed 169 “overt acts” in furtherance of the attacks, General Hartmann said.
The charges are being translated into the native language of each of the accused
and will soon be served on them, he said.
A Defense Department official said in advance of the announcement that
prosecutors were seeking the death penalty because, “if any case warrants it, it
would be for individuals who were parties to a crime of that scale.” The terror
attacks, in which civilian airliners were hijacked and deliberately crashed into
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, were the deadliest in American history.
The decision to seek the death penalty will no doubt increase the international
focus on the case and present new challenges to the troubled military commission
system that has yet to begin a single trial. The death penalty is an issue that
has caused friction for decades between the United States and many of its allies
who consider capital punishment barbaric.
“The system hasn’t been able to handle the less-complicated cases it has been
presented with to date,” said David Glazier, a former Navy officer who is a
professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
In addition to Mr. Mohammed, the other five being charged include detainees who
officials say were coordinators and intermediaries in the plot, among them a man
labeled the “20th hijacker,” who was denied entry to the United States in the
month before the attacks.
Under the rules of the Guantánamo war-crimes system, the military prosecutors
can designate charges as capital when they present them, and it is that first
phase of the process that is expected this week. The military official who then
reviews them, Susan J. Crawford, a former military appeals court judge, has the
authority to accept or reject a death-penalty request.
General Hartmann said he could not predict when actual trials would begin, but
that pretrial procedures would take several months at least. He said the accused
will enjoy the same rights that members of the American military enjoy, and that
the proceedings will be “as completely open as possible,” notwithstanding the
occasional need to protect classified information.
In no sense will the proceedings be secret, the general said. “Every piece of
evidence, every stitch of evidence, every whiff of evidence” will be available
to the defendants, General Hartmann said.
Some officials briefed on the case have said the prosecutors view their task in
seeking convictions for the Sept. 11 attacks as a historic challenge. A special
group of military and Justice Department lawyers has been working on the case
for several years.
Even if the detainees are convicted on capital charges, any execution would be
many months or, perhaps years, from being carried out, lawyers have said, in
part because a death sentence would have to be scrutinized by civilian appeals
courts.
Federal officials have said in recent months that there is no death chamber at
the detention camp at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and
that they knew of no specific plans for how a death sentence would be carried
out.
The military justice system, which does not govern the Guantánamo cases,
provides for execution by lethal injection in death sentence convictions. But
the United States military has rarely executed a prisoner in recent times.
The last military execution was in 1961, when an Army private, John A. Bennett,
was hanged after being convicted of rape and attempted murder. Currently, there
are six service members appealing military death sentences, according to a
recently published article by a lawyer who specializes in military capital
cases, Dwight H. Sullivan, a former chief military defense lawyer at Guantánamo.
General Hartmann said Mr. Mohammed is believed to have presented the idea of an
airliner attack on the United States to Osama bin Laden in 1999 and then
coordinated its planning.
The others being charged are Mohammed al-Qahtani, the man officials have labeled
the 20th hijacker; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, said to have been the main intermediary
between the hijackers and leaders of Al Qaeda; Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, known as
Ammar al-Baluchi, a nephew of Mr. Mohammed, who has been identified as Mr.
Mohammed’s lieutenant for the 2001 operation; Mr. al-Baluchi’s assistant,
Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi; and Walid bin Attash, a detainee known as Khallad, who
investigators say selected and trained some of the hijackers.
Ramzi bin al-Shibh was supposed to have been a 20th hijacker, and made a
videotape portraying himself as a martyr, General Hartmann said. But he was
unable to obtain a United States visa, and so had to content himself with
helping the eventual hijackers find flight schools and with carrying out
financial transactions to further the plot, the general said.
Relatives of the Sept. 11 victims have expressed differing views of potential
death sentences, with some arguing that it would accomplish little other than
martyring men for whom martyrdom may be viewed as a reward.
But on Sunday, Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles F. Burlingame III was the
pilot of the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 that was crashed into the
Pentagon, said she would approve of an effort by prosecutors to seek the
execution of men she blames for killing her brother. Ms. Burlingame said such a
case could help refocus the public’s attention on what she called the calculated
brutality of the attacks, which she said has been largely forgotten.
“My opinion is,” she said, “if the death of 3,000 people isn’t sufficient for a
death penalty in this country, then why do we even have the death penalty?”
Lawyers said a prosecution move to seek the death penalty in six cases that will
draw worldwide attention was risky. They said it would increase the stakes at
Guantánamo partly by amplifying the attention internationally to cases that
would draw intense attention in any event.
The military commission system has been troubled almost from the start, when it
was set up in an order by President Bush in November 2001. It has been beset by
legal challenges and practical difficulties, including a 2006 decision by the
Supreme Court striking down the administration’s first system at Guantánamo.
Although officials have spoken of charging 80 or more detainees with war crimes,
so far only one case has been completed, and that was through a plea bargain.
Eric M. Freedman, a Hofstra University law professor who has been a consultant
to detainees’ lawyers, said a decision to seek the death penalty would magnify
the attention on each of the many steps in a capital case. Intense scrutiny, he
said, “would be drawn to the proceedings both legally and politically from
around the world.”
Some countries have been critical of the United States’ use of the death penalty
in civilian cases, and a request for execution in the military commission system
would import much of that criticism to the already heated debates about the
legitimacy of Guantánamo and the Bush administration’s legal approach there,
some lawyers said.
Tom Fleener, an Army Reserve major who was until recently a military defense
lawyer at Guantánamo, said that bringing death penalty cases in the military
commission system would bog down the untested system. He noted that many legal
questions remain unanswered at Guantánamo, including how much of the trials will
be conducted in closed, secret proceedings; how the military judges will handle
evidence obtained by interrogators’ coercive tactics; and whether the judges
will require experienced death-penalty lawyers to take part in such cases.
“Neither the system is ready, nor are the defense attorneys ready to do a death
penalty case in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,” Major Fleener said.
Professor Glazier of Loyola said the military commission system was devised to
avoid many of the hurdles that have slowed civilian capital cases. Still, he
said, he expected intense scrutiny and criticism of such cases that could slow
proceedings.
In any event, vigorous trial battles and appeals would probably mean that no
execution would be imminent. “It certainly seems impossible to get this done by
the end of the Bush administration,” Professor Glazier said.
General Hartmann said nothing to counter that impression. Asked whether
executions would take place at Guantánamo or elsewhere, he noted that a
defendant who is convicted will have the right to several levels of appeal. “So
we are a long way from determining the details of the death penalty, and when
that time comes, if it should ever come at all, we will follow the law at that
time and the procedures that are in place at that time,” the general said.
David Stout contributed reporting from Washington.
U.S. Presents Charges Against 6 in Sept. 11 Case, NYT,
11.2.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/washington/11cnd-gitmo.html?hp
War Costs Next Year Estimated at $685 Billion or More
February 6, 2008
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT and THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON — The military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost $170
billion in the next fiscal year over and above the $515.4 billion regular
Pentagon budget that President Bush has proposed, Defense Secretary Robert M.
Gates said on Wednesday.
Mr. Gates gave that estimate in testimony before the Senate Armed Services
Committee after cautioning the panel that any estimate would be dicey, given the
unpredictability of war.
“Well, a straight-line projection, Mr. Chairman, of our current expenditures
would probably put the full-year cost in a strictly arithmetic approach at about
$170 billion,” Mr. Gates said in response to questions from Senator Carl Levin,
the Michigan Democrat who is the head of the committee.
So, Mr. Levin pressed, “That would be a total then of $685 billion” in Pentagon
spending for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. “Does that sound right?”
“Yes, sir,” Mr. Gates replied. “But as I indicated, I have no confidence in that
figure.”
Mr. Levin has been a persistent critic of the war in Iraq, and he has complained
that the Bush administration has been less than straightforward about the
financial costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns by seeking supplemental
funding outside the regular Pentagon budget. Congress has gone along with the
supplemental requests, with members of both parties pledging to give American
troops whatever they need.
“While the monetary cost is not the most important part of the debate over Iraq
or Afghanistan, it does need to be part of that debate, and the citizens of our
nation have a right to know what those costs are projected to be,” Senator Levin
said.
Mr. Gates got a relatively friendly welcome, perhaps in part because he has
tried to adopt a style less confrontational than that of his predecessor, Donald
H. Rumsfeld. Adm. Michael G. Mullen was also welcomed warmly by committee
members in his first appearance before the panel as chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff,
Senator Levin complained, as he has before, about what he sees as the failure of
the post-Saddam Hussein government in Iraq. “For years, the Iraqi leaders have
failed to seize the opportunity our brave troops gave them,” he said. “It is
long past time that the Iraqi leaders hear a clear, simple message: we can’t
save them from themselves; it’s in their hands, not ours, to create a nation by
making the political compromises needed to end the conflict.”
Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, the committee’s ranking Republican and one
of his party’s most influential voices on military matters, did not disagree
with Senator Levin on Iraq. “I think by any fair standard, that level of
progress to date is falling below the expectations that we had hoped,” he said.
“Senator Levin quite appropriately observed that the elected officials in Iraq
are simply not exercising the full responsibility of the range of sovereignty,
and that puts our forces in a certain degree of continuing peril and risk.”
Mr. Gates said in response to questions that he will soon visit Iraq again and
confer with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander, on whether and
when to reduce American troop strength to the “pre-surge” level of about
130,000.
Also on Wednesday, Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the commander of NATO forces in
Afghanistan, agreed that the international military mission there was
“under-resourced,” in particular when compared with deployments to Iraq.
“Afghanistan, land mass-wise, is half again as big as Iraq, for example, if you
want to get some relative bearing there,” General McNeill said during a Pentagon
news briefing.
In Afghanistan, the population is “estimated to be perhaps as much as 3 million
more than Iraq, yet we have, in trying to operate in a counterinsurgency
environment, only a fraction of the force that the coalition has in Iraq,”
General McNeill added. “So there’s no question it’s an under-resourced force.”
General McNeill said that if the official American military counterinsurgency
doctrine were applied to Afghanistan, then well over 400,000 allied and Afghan
security troops would be required. He acknowledged the impossibility of fielding
a force of that size.
“The trick, then, is to manage the risk that’s inherent in having an
under-resourced international force and reaching the level of capacity at which
the Afghan national security forces ought to be,” he said, stressing especially
the importance of training the local police.
The NATO-led security assistance mission has about 40,000 troops in Afghanistan,
of which 14,000 are American. Separately, the United States has 12,000 other
troops there conducting counterterrorism and support missions. Mr. Gates in
recent days signed a deployment order for an additional 3,200 marines for
temporary duty in Afghanistan.
The general also disputed public assessments that the Afghan insurgency was
growing, and he cited the number of low- to high-level insurgent leaders who
were killed or captured. “That number is significant,” General McNeill said.
“Many of those were jihadists who cut their teeth fighting the Soviets. They
were good at their skills. They’re no longer on the battlefield. That’ll be very
helpful.”
Commenting on a recent public debate about skills of various NATO nations at
waging counter-insurgency missions, General McNeill said that “it is probably an
incontrovertible truth that if you pull a huge alliance together, that the
going-in position of different nationalities of that alliance, or at least their
military forces, is somewhat different.”
He acknowledged differences in training, as well as varying political pressures
from individual home capitals that affect the capabilities of those forces in
Afghanistan.
Looking to the future, General McNeill predicted an exceedingly large opium
harvest, and warned that significant portions of narcotics profits would go to
Taliban and other insurgent activity.
War Costs Next Year
Estimated at $685 Billion or More, NYT, 6.2.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/06/washington/06cnd-military.html
Pentagon
wants more GIs, Marines Corps
1 February
2008
USA Today
By Lolita C. Baldor, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON
— The Pentagon is seeking more than $20 billion in its 2009 budget to increase
the size of the Army and Marine Corps as the military struggles to fight wars on
two fronts, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
The
proposed budget, which will be unveiled Monday, will call for $15.5 billion to
boost the size of the Army by 7,000 soldiers, to a total of 532,400. And it will
propose spending $5 billion to add 5,000 Marines to the Corps, for a total of
194,000.
Separately, the budget will call for nearly $11 billion to cover the costs of
training, recruiting and retention.
Both services have been strained by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, prompting
Pentagon leaders to seek money to increase recruiting and bonuses in a broad
effort to add soldiers and Marines.
The funding is part of the Defense Department's overall $515 billion request for
the budget year beginning Oct. 1 that President Bush will send to Congress. That
is a $35 billion — or a 7.5% increase over this year's funding level.
Service members would get a 3.4% pay raise as part of the budget plan. Army
personnel costs would eat up more than a third of its proposed budget, or nearly
$52 billion.
Plans are to increase the number of the active duty Army, Army National Guard
and Army Reserve by 74,000 overall, with the active duty force growing by 65,000
to a total of 547,000. Army leaders plan to complete the increase by 2010, and
about half of the 65,000 has already been achieved.
The Pentagon budget would fund a force of 2.2 million in the Army, Air Force,
Navy and Marines. And it also calls for $70 billion as an initial down payment
to cover the costs of the war for the fiscal year.
Spending on aircraft, weapons, and research and development defense-wide would
total close to $184 billion, an increase of less than 5% over the current year.
The Army alone is requesting $24.6 billion for weapons and aircraft programs, an
increase of $2 billion over its current spending level.
Funding will also be sought for one Virginia Class submarine, an aircraft
carrier, a destroyer and several other combat and cargo ships for the Navy; a
broad array of unmanned aircraft, and $10.5 billion for missile defense.
The Army's total budget request for 2009 is $140.7 billion, up from $130.2
billion in this current year.
Increasing the number of soldiers will also boost construction costs for the
Army. More than $3.7 billion of the Army's proposed $6.8 billion military
construction and family housing budget would be earmarked for facilities to
accommodate the growing force.
Aircraft and weapons funding in the Army's proposed budget include:
• $3.6 billion for the Army's top priority, the Future Combat System, which
includes robots, unmanned aircraft and other computerized systems designed to
transform the service's war fighting abilities.
• $1.9 billion for ammunition.
• Nearly $1.2 billion for 119 Stryker armored vehicles.
• $1.1 billion for 63 Black Hawk helicopters.
• $1.2 billion for 23 Chinook cargo helicopters.
• $1 billion for 108 advanced Patriot missiles and other system components.
• $947 million for more than 5,000 Humvees.
• $945 million to buy nearly 3,200 medium tactical trucks, including 2.5-ton and
5-ton trucks.
The Army's proposed spending on research and development programs would be
essentially the same as this year, about $10 billion.
Pentagon wants more GIs, Marines Corps, UT, 1.2.2008,
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-02-01-soldiers-more_N.htm
Pentagon
rejects report, says ready for WMD attack
Fri Feb 1,
2008
5:06pm EST
Reuters
By Kristin Roberts
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - The Pentagon on Friday insisted it is ready to respond to a
chemical, biological or nuclear attack inside the United States, rejecting an
independent panel's criticism of its preparations.
But the Pentagon conceded it is not yet satisfied with its plans to respond to
some of the 15 catastrophic attack scenarios that federal agencies have been
ordered to prepare for, such as a nuclear attack or a series of chemical attacks
throughout the country.
Paul McHale, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, said plans to
respond to those scenarios would be improved this year.
"We are prepared to respond," McHale said. "We are not prepared to respond with
the speed, the efficiency and the effectiveness that we intend to achieve."
McHale said detailed plans for a response to a major hurricane or pandemic
influenza were well developed and on par with the blueprint drafted for war
operations.
When it came to responding to a nuclear attack, a series of dirty bomb attacks,
an aerosolized anthrax attack or a series of chemical weapons attacks throughout
the country, the current plans were inadequate, McHale said.
"That is a candid recognition, a blunt recognition that we are not where we need
to be," he said.
McHale dismissed the harsh criticism directed at the Defense Department on
Thursday by the Commission on the National Guard and Reserve and its chairman,
retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Arnold Punaro.
Punaro called planning for a domestic attack "totally unacceptable." The
commission was especially worried about an "appalling" lack of trained troops
for that role.
RECOMMENDATIONS REJECTED TOO
McHale said the Pentagon agreed with some commission proposals -- including its
recommendation that National Guard troops have the lead role in the its
operations during domestic emergency response situations. But he called core
elements of the report fundamentally flawed.
The National Guard is a part-time force with a dual mandate to fight overseas
and serve in domestic defense and emergency response roles.
The Pentagon rejected the commission's proposal to have the Guard focus more
squarely on its domestic role, leaving overseas fighting to the active-duty
military.
The Pentagon has relied heavily on the Guard in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Using
reservists allowed the United States to fight those wars without a draft, the
commission said.
Confining reservists to domestic defense would require the active-duty Army to
grow by more than a third immediately and threaten the viability of the
all-volunteer military, said Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, head of the Guard.
(Reporting by Kristin Roberts, Editing by Alan Elsner)
Pentagon rejects report, says ready for WMD attack, R,
1.2.2008,
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN0144703120080201
|