Grand Jury Prize Winner, Sundance Film Festival

“Chalmers Johnson’s voice has never been more urgently needed, and in Nemesis it rings with eloquence, clarity, and truth.”

—James Carroll, author of House of War

The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975

The Industrial Policy Debate

(editor and contributor)

Politics and Productivity: How Japan’s Development Strategy Works

New York, New York 10010

Hormones and acne, her change is coming in, ...

San Francisco Chronicle, September 23, 2001

One of the oddest features of political life in the United States in the years since the terrorist attacks is how few people have thought or acted like Barbara Lee. The public expresses itself in opinion polls, which some students of politics scrutinize intently, but there is little passion in the society, certainly none proportionate to the threats facing our democratic republic. The United States today is like a cruise ship on the Niagara River upstream of the most spectacular falls in North America. A few people on board have begun to pick up a slight hiss in the background, to observe a faint haze of mist in the air or on their glasses, to note that the river current seems to be running slightly faster. But no one yet seems to have realized that it is almost too late to head for shore.

Like the Chinese, Ottoman, Hapsburg, imperial German, Nazi, imperial Japanese, British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Soviet empires in the last century, we are approaching the edge of a huge waterfall and are about to plunge over it.

If the American democratic system is no longer working as planned, if the constitutional checks and balances as well as other structures put in place by the founders to prevent tyranny are increasingly less operational, we have not completely lacked for witnesses of every stripe, domestic and foreign. General Tommy Franks, commander of the American assault on Baghdad, for instance, went so far as to predict that another serious terrorist attack on the United States would “begin to unravel the fabric of our Constitution,” and under such circumstances, he was open to the idea that “the Constitution could be scrapped in favor of a military form of government.”¹ The historian Kevin Baker feared that we are no longer far from the day when, like the Roman Senate in 27 BC, our Congress will take its last meaningful vote and turn over power to a military dictator. “In the end, we’ll beg for the coup,” he wrote.²

On October 10, 2002, Senator Robert Byrd (Democrat from West Virginia) asked plaintively about the separation of powers, “Why are we being hounded into action on a resolution that turns over to President Bush the Congress’s Constitutional power to declare war? ... The judgment of history will not be kind to us if we take this step.”³ Nonetheless, the following day, the resolution carried by a 77-23 vote in the Senate and 296-133 in the House of Representatives. The Berkshire Eagle editorialized, “The Senate, which was designed by the framers of the Constitution to act as a brake on the popular passions of the day, was little more than a speed bump under the White House steamroller.”⁴ The libertarian writer Bill Winter conjectured that the problem was “the monarchization of America under Bush.”⁵ Adam Young, a Canadian political commentator, wondered, “How did the chief magistrate of a confederated republic degrade into the global tyrant we experience today, part secular pope, part military despot, part pseudo-philosopher-king and full-time overbearing global gangster?”⁶ Indeed, that is the question for all of us.

Former British foreign secretary Robin Cook noted that “[a] 11 the checks and balances that the founding fathers constructed to restrain presidential power are broken instruments.” Cook observed the hubris and megalomania that flowed from this in John Bolton, then the number three official at the State Department (subsequently ambassador to the United Nations). When asked about possible incentives that might cause Iran to end its nuclear ambitions, Bolton replied, “I don’t do carrots.” Cook accurately predicted that members of the Bush administration “will ... celebrate their [2004] election victory by putting [the Iraqi city of] Fallujah to the torch,” as they did that very November.⁷

Marine general Anthony Zinni, General Franks’s predecessor as Cent-corn commander in the Middle East, worried about the way the Pentagon was further expanding its powers at the expense of other agencies of government. “Why the hell,” he asked, “would the Department of Defense be the organization in our government that deals with the reconstruction of Iraq? Doesn’t make sense.”⁸ One anonymous foreign service officer supplied an answer to Los Angeles Times reporter Sonni Efron, “I just wake up in the morning and tell myself, ‘There’s been a military coup,’ and then it all makes sense.”⁹ Even the president himself was a witness of sorts to the changes under way, baldly asserting at a White House press conference on April 13, 2004, that he was “the ultimate decision-maker for this country”—a notion that would have appalled the authors of the Constitution.¹⁰

I believe that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have led the country into a perilous cul-de-sac, but they did not do it alone and removing them from office will not necessarily solve the problem. The crisis of government in the United States has been building at least since World War II. The emergence of the imperial presidency and the atrophying of the legislative and judicial branches have deep roots in the postwar military-industrial complex, in the way broad sectors of the public have accepted the military as our most effective public institution, and in aberrations in our electoral system. The interesting issue is not the damage done by Bush, Cheney, and their followers but how they were able to get away with it, given the barriers that exist in the Constitution to prevent just the sorts of misuses of power for which they have become notorious.

Historian Carol Berkin in her book A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the Constitution argues that the nation’s “Founders—including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania and dozens of others—envisioned a supreme legislative branch as the heart and soul of America’s central government.... America’s modern presidency, with all its trappings, would be unimaginable to men like Madison, Washington, and Franklin. Of all those historic figures at the 1787 [Constitutional] Convention, perhaps only Alexander Hamilton would relish today’s playing of ‘Hail to the Chief.’ “¹¹

The intent of the founders was to prevent a recurrence of the tyranny they had endured under Britain’s King George III. They bent all their ingenuity and practical experience to preventing tyrannies of one, of the few, of a majority, of the monied classes, or of any other group that might obtain and exercise unchecked power, often adopting institutional precedents from the Roman Republic. Inspired by the French political philosopher Montesquieu’s discussion of the “separation of powers” in his On the Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748, the drafters of the American Constitution produced a sophisticated scheme to balance power in a republic. The most basic structure they chose was federalism, setting up the states as alternatives to and limitations on the power of the national government. Congress was given that quintessential parliamentary power—control of the budget—without which it would be merely an ornamental body like the “people’s congresses” in communist-dominated countries. Congress was also charged with initiating all legislation, making the final decision to go to war, and if necessary getting rid of an unsatisfactory president by impeachment, something also achievable through periodic elections. To moderate the power of Congress somewhat, the Constitution divided it into two quite differently elected and apportioned houses, each capable of vetoing the other’s decisions.

Both houses of Congress must ultimately pass all laws, and the president, who is entrusted with implementing them, is given a veto as well. The Congress, in turn, can override a presidential veto with a two-thirds vote, and even when Congress and the president agree on a law, the Supreme Court, exercising the function of interpreting the laws, can still declare it unconstitutional. The president and members of Congress must be re-elected or leave office, but judges serve for life, although Congress can impeach them. The president nominates the heads of the cabinet departments, who serve at his pleasure, as well as all judges, but the Senate must approve them.

Over time, this balance-of-power spirit came to influence other institutions of government that the Constitution did not mention, including the armed forces, where competition among the services—the army, navy, air force, and Marine Corps—dilutes somewhat the enormous coercive power entrusted to them.¹² To prevent a tyranny of the majority, the Constitution authorizes fixed terms and fixed times for elections (borrowed from the Roman Republic) as a way to interfere with the monopolization of power by an individual, an oligarchy, or a political party.

Unfortunately, after more than two centuries (about the same length of time that the Roman Republic was in its prime), this framework has almost completely disintegrated. For those who believe that the structure of government in Washington today bears some resemblance to that outlined in the Constitution of 1787, the burden of proof is on them. The president now dominates the government in a way no ordinary monarch possibly could. He has at his disposal the clandestine services of the CIA, a private army unaccountable to the Congress, the press, or the public because everything it does is secret. No president since Harry Truman, having discovered what unlimited power the CIA affords him, has ever failed to use it. Meanwhile, the “defense” budgets of the Pentagon dwarf those of the rest of the government and have undermined democratic decision making in the process. Funds for military hardware are distributed in as many states as possible to ensure that any member of Congress who might consider voting against a new weapons system would be accused of putting some of his constituents out of work.

When in May 2005, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld listed a large number of unneeded domestic military bases that he wanted to close as an economy measure, the affected communities promptly erupted in protest and began frantic lobbying efforts to “save” their particular installations. Advocates of keeping the bases open phrase their arguments in terms of national security, but the true reason is jobs, jobs, jobs.¹³ As the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote at the height of the Cold War, “It is no secret that the billions of dollars demanded by the Pentagon for the armaments industry are necessary not for ‘national security’ but for keeping the economy from collapsing.”¹⁴

“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” It is not precisely clear who first spoke these immortal words—Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, or the antislavery abolitionist Wendell Phillips—but during the Cold War and its aftermath, Americans were not particularly vigilant when it came to excessive concentration of power in the presidency and its appendages, and we are now paying a very high price for that. From the founding of the republic to the moment of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address in 1961, some of our leaders have warned us that the greatest threat to our republican structure of government is war, including its associated maladies of standing armies, a military-industrial complex, and all the vested interests that develop around a massive military establishment.

The classic statement of this threat was by the chief author of the Constitution, James Madison:

Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manner and of morals, engendered in both. No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.... War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will, which is to direct it. In war, the public treasuries are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.¹⁵

The United States has been continuously engaged in or mobilized for war since 1941. Using statistics compiled by the Federation of American Scientists, Gore Vidal has listed 201 overseas military operations between the end of World War II and September 11, 2001, in which the United States struck the first blow. Among these, a typical example was Operation Urgent Fury in 1983, “Reagan’s attack on the island of Grenada, a month-long caper that General [Alexander M.] Haig disloyally said could have been handled more efficiently by the Provincetown police department.”¹⁶ Excluding minor military operations, Drexel University historian and political scientist Michael Sullivan counts only “invasions, interventions, and regime changes since World War II” and comes up with thirty bloody, often clandestine, American wars from Greece (1947-49) to Yugoslavia (1995 and 1999).¹⁷ Neither of these compilations included the wars in Afghanistan (2001-) and Iraq (2003-).

It should be noted that since 1947, while we have used our military power for political and military gain in a long list of countries, in no instance has democratic government come about as a direct result. In some important cases, on the other hand, democracy has developed in opposition to our interference—for example, after the collapse of the regime of the CIA-installed Greek colonels in 1974; after the demise of the U.S.-supported fascist dictatorships in Portugal in 1974 and Spain in 1975; after the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1986; after the ouster of General Chun Doo-Hwan in South Korea in 1987; and after the ending of thirty-eight years of martial law on the island of Taiwan in the same year.¹⁸ The United States holds the unenviable record of having helped install and then supported such dictators as the Shah of Iran, General Suharto in Indonesia, Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and Sese Seko Mobutu in Congo/Zaire, not to mention the series of American-backed militarists in South Vietnam and Cambodia until we were finally expelled from Indochina.¹⁹ In addition, for decades we ran one of the most extensive international terrorist operations in history against Cuba and Nicaragua because their struggles for national independence had produced outcomes that we did not like.

The unintended result of this record of militarism is the contemporary Leviathan that dominates Washington, threatening our nation with bankruptcy, turning many of the organs of our “free press” into Pravda- like mouthpieces, and disgracing the nation by allowing our young men and women to torture prisoners picked up on various battlefields or even snatched from city streets in allied countries. In using the term “militarism,” I want to distinguish it from defense of country. No one questions the need to raise a citizen’s army and me obligation of able-bodied men and women to serve in it in order to defend the nation from foreign aggression. But the wars listed above are virtually all ones that we entered by choice rather than out of necessity. In many cases, they were shrouded in secrecy, while our political leaders lied to Congress and the public about the need to fight them. The launching of the Vietnam and Iraq wars are only the most blatant examples of presidential deception.²⁰ There are almost certainly several cases currently hidden behind the walls of “classification” in which we secretly fomented the downfall of a government and offered clandestine assistance to the side we favored.²¹ Most recently, these may well include the abortive attempt to overthrow President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in April 2002 and the use of front organizations to bring to power pro-U.S. governments in the former Soviet states of Georgia in November 2003 and the Ukraine in November 2004.

Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate and a Vietnam veteran with twenty-three years of service in the U.S. Army, believes, “Americans in our own time have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force. To a degree without precedent in U.S. history, Americans have come to define the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action, and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals.”²²

How did this come about? As a start, we have indeed fought too many wars of choice, starting in 1898 with our imperialist conquests of the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and our establishment of a protectorate over Cuba, shortly followed by World War I. World War II, while not a war of choice, produced the most complete mobilization of resources in our history and led to the deployment of our forces on every continent. After the victory of 1945, some Americans urged a rapid demobilization, which actually was well under way when the Cold War and the Korean War restored and enlarged our military apparatus. It would never again be reined in, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The inevitable result was a continual transfer of powers to the presidency exactly as Madison had predicted, the use of executive secrecy to freeze out Congress and the judiciary, the loss of congressional mastery over the budget, and the rise of two new, extraconstitutional centers of power that are today out of control— the Department of Defense and the fifteen intelligence organizations, the best known of which is the Central Intelligence Agency. I believe we will never again know peace, nor in all probability survive very long as a nation, unless we abolish the CIA, restore intelligence collecting to the State Department, and remove all but purely military functions from the Pentagon. Even if we did those things, the mystique of America as a model democracy may have been damaged beyond repair. Certainly, under the best of circumstances, it will take a generation or more to overcome the image of “America as torturer.”²³

In 1964, Hannah Arendt addressed a similar problem when she tried to plumb the evil of the Nazi regime. Her book Eichmann in Jerusalem dealt with the trial of the former SS officer Adolf Eichmann, who was charged with organizing the transport of Jews to death camps during World War II. She subtitled her book A Report on the Banality of Evil but used that now famous phrase only once, at book’s end, without explaining it further.²⁴ Long after Arendt’s death, Jerome Kohn, a colleague, compiled a volume of her essays entitled Responsibility and Judgment. What made Eichmann both evil and banal, Arendt concluded in one of those essays, was his inability to think for himself.

“Some years ago,” she wrote, “reporting the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, I spoke of the ‘banality of evil’ and meant with this no theory or doctrine but something quite factual, the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was perhaps an extraordinary shallowness. However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.”²⁵

Arendt was trying to locate Eichmann’s conscience. She called him a “desk murderer,” an equally apt term for George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld—for anyone, in fact, who orders remote-control killing of the modern sort—the bombardment of a country that lacks any form of air defense, the firing of cruise missiles from a warship at sea into countries unable to respond, such as Iraq, Sudan, or Afghanistan, or, say, the unleashing of a Hellfire missile from a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle controlled by “pilots” thousands of miles from the prospective target.

How do ordinary people become desk murderers? First, they must lose the ability to think because, according to Arendt, “thinking conditions men against evil doing.”²⁶ Jerome Kohn adds, “With some degree of confidence it may be said that the ability to think, which Eichmann lacked, is the precondition of judging, and that the refusal as well as the inability to judge, to imagine before your eyes the others whom your judgment represents and to whom it responds, invite evil to enter and infect the world.”²⁷ To lack a personal conscience means “never to start the soundless solitary dialogue we call thinking.”²⁸

If an individual’s thinking is short-circuited and does not rise to the level of making judgments, he or she is able to understand acts, including evil acts, only in terms of following orders, doing one’s duty, being loyal to one’s “homeland,” maintaining solidarity with one’s fellow soldiers, or surrendering one’s will to that of the group. This phenomenon is common in some forms of political life, as Arendt demonstrated in her most famous work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, but it is ubiquitous in military life, where, in order to prevail in battle, soldiers have been conditioned to follow orders instantly and to act as a cohesive group. In such roles, “Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention which all events and facts arouse by virtue of their existence.”²⁹ This is one reason why democratic republics must be particularly vigilant about standing armies and wars of choice if, that is, they intend to retain their liberties.

At Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, some American soldiers had become so inured to the torture of Iraqi inmates that they made a screen saver of naked Iraqi captives stacked in a “pyramid” with their tormentors looking on and laughing in the background.³⁰ By contrast, on January 13, 2004, Sergeant Joseph M. Darby of the army’s 372nd Military Police Company turned over a computer disk of similar photos from Abu Ghraib of American soldiers torturing Iraqis to the army’s Criminal Investigations Division. He said that the photos “violated everything that I personally believed in and everything that I had been taught about the rules of war.”³¹ Sergeant Darby had not stopped thinking.

No Pentagon civilian or American officer above the rank of lieutenant colonel has so far been prosecuted for the policies that led to Abu Ghraib and other acts of torture and murder in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, another proof that, as a consequence of our half century of devotion to war, we unintentionally abandoned our republican checks on the activities of public officials and elevated the military to a position that places it, in actual practice, beyond the law. In so doing, what we have created is a large corps of desk murderers in our executive branch and the highest ranks of our armed forces. These people have replaced their ability to think and judge with “cliches, stock phrases, and adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct.” For example, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shrugged off the defilement and looting of ancient monuments and museums in Baghdad as the American occupation of that country began by saying, “Stuff happens,” and then joking that he did not think there were that many ancient vases in Iraq.³²

It is, of course, natural for political and military leaders to try to put favorable interpretations on their policies. In the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, however, this has meant making statements that consist of little more than flat contradictions of evidence or specious reinterpretations of law. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, for example, has tried to legalize the Bush administration’s decisions to torture prisoners of war by arguing that a “new paradigm renders obsolete [the Geneva Conventions’] strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”³³ But the allegedly new paradigm is apparent only to Gonzales, and in any case he lacks the authority to nullify a ratified treaty.

Richard Myers, a four-star air force general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared categorically to Fox News, “One thing we don’t do is we don’t torture,” as if that disposed of the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison.³⁴ In speaking to our European allies about extensive evidence that the CIA was operating secret prisons and torturing the inmates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “With respect to detainees, the United States Government complies with its Constitution, its laws, and its treaty obligations. Acts of physical or mental torture are expressly prohibited. The United States Government does not authorize or condone torture of detainees. Torture, and conspiracy to commit torture, are crimes under U.S. law, wherever they may occur in the world.” She mentioned that there had been cases of the “unlawful treatment” of prisoners, but added that “the horrible mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib that sickened us all ... arose under the different legal framework that applies to armed conflict in Iraq.”³⁵ She failed to explain what the nature of this different legal framework actually is or how this squares with a ban on torture “wherever [it] may occur in the world “

Commenting on the unauthorized bombing of civilian villages in Afghanistan, former secretary of state Colin Powell said on German TV, “We spent a huge amount of money and we are putting our young men and women on the line, every day, to put in place a form of government that was decided upon by the Afghan people. And we are helping them to rebuild and reconstruct their society. That pattern is the American pattern. We’re very proud of it. It’s been repeated many times over, and it will be repeated again in Iraq.”³⁶

As Arendt suggests, it is precisely when such absurdities and flights from reality replace clear thinking that evil enters the picture. What follows are but three illustrations of the consequences of the failure of our political and military leadership to think: the systematic killing of unarmed civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq; the creation of a global network of both known and secret prisons around the world in which our troops or intelligence agents routinely torture the inmates; and the way the military’s attitudes at the time of its 2003 assault on Baghdad led to the destruction and desecration of some of the world’s oldest known human artifacts.

During World War II in East Asia, the Imperial Japanese Army contrived one of the worst euphemisms ever used to mask criminal acts— namely, “comfort women” (ianfu) to refer to the women and girls abducted in occupied countries and sent to the front lines to serve as prostitutes for Japanese officers and soldiers.³⁷ This phrase will probably haunt Japan until the end of time. A comparable term invented by the United States military is “collateral damage,” meaning its killing of civilians and the destruction of private property while allegedly pursuing one or another of its unilaterally declared acts of “liberation.”

“Broadly defined,” says a U.S. Air Force training manual, “collateral damage is unintentional damage or incidental damage affecting facilities, equipment, or personnel occurring as a result of military actions directed against targeted enemy forces or facilities. Such damage can occur to friendly, neutral, and even enemy forces.”³⁸ This military euphemism has been substituted for plainspoken words that might induce guilt in airmen when they bomb and strafe defenseless communities or in soldiers when they kick down doors of private homes, rush in pointing assault rifles at women and children, and sometimes rob residents under cover of searching for enemies or contraband. The military also certainly hoped that its adoption of such a neutral, inoffensive expression for ones that might offend or suggest unpleasantness would strengthen the resolve of its soldiers and perhaps prevent them from being held accountable for war crimes.

“Collateral damage” is nowhere recognized, or even mentioned, in humanitarian international law. In fact, intentional attacks of any sort on civilians are prohibited under “Common Article 3,” which applies to all four Geneva Conventions. The United States has signed and ratified the Geneva Conventions (although it never ratified two supplemental protocols of 1977 that spelled out the international rules of war in greater detail). Common Article 3 prohibits “at any time and in any place whatsoever” violence, including murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture, and outrages to human dignity against protected persons—that is, “persons taking no active part in hostilities,” such as civilians, the wounded, and prisoners of war. “Such persons are, in all circumstances, entitled to respect for their honor and religion, and must be protected against insults and public curiosity. No physical or moral coercion shall be exercised to obtain information from them or third parties. Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.”³⁹

Among the gravest contemporary instances of “collateral damage” were the sanctions enforced against Iraq between 1991 and 2003 and the slaughter of Afghan and Iraqi civilians in the wars waged by the United States after 9/11. On May 11, 1996, the CBS television program 60 Minutes made famous one of the more notorious statistics in the history of Iraqi-American relations. In an interview with then secretary of state Madeleine Albright, correspondent Lesley Stahl said, “We have heard that a half million children have died as a result of the sanctions [in Iraq]. That’s more than died in Hiroshima.” Then Stahl asked, “Is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.” Osama bin Laden cited just this statistic as one of the reasons al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. on 9/11. In her 2003 memoir, Madam Secretary, Albright amended her comment this way: “I must have been crazy; I should have answered the question by reframing it and pointing out the inherent flaw in the premise behind it. Saddam Hussein could have prevented any child from suffering simply by meeting his obligations.”⁴⁰ Her clarification, however, was even more disingenuous than her earlier indifference to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children. As a former ambassador to the United Nations, she was certainly fully informed about the sanctions program and its impact.

During the Gulf War of 1991, the United States drove Iraq from Kuwait but stopped short of invading Iraq itself. Nonetheless, President George H. W. Bush and his national security adviser, General Brent Scow-croft, were determined to do everything in their power to make postwar Iraq ungovernable, to stimulate revolt within the country, and to force Saddam Hussein from office. During the war itself, the United States dropped some ninety thousand tons of bombs on Iraq in the space of forty-three days, intentionally destroying the civilian infrastructure, including eighteen of twenty electricity-generating plants and the water-pumping and sanitation systems.⁴¹ Dr. Thomas Nagy, a professor at George Washington University, analyzed a large number of declassified Defense Intelligence Agency documents on the bombing and concluded that American officials were well aware that the purposeful destruction of Iraq’s civilian water sanitation systems would cause increased outbreaks of disease and high rates of child mortality.⁴² The primary document, “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,” dated January 22, 1991, argues that Iraq’s rivers “contain biological materials, pollutants, and are laden with bacteria. Unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could occur.” Later documents state that the sanctions imposed after the war explicitly embargoed the importation of chlorine in order to prevent the purification of drinking water.

A Washington Post analysis of the air war published on June 23, 1991, quoted typical, although unnamed, Pentagon strategists on the bombing campaign, one of whom suggested that” [t]he definition of innocents gets to be a little bit unclear.... They do live there, and ultimately people have some control over what goes on in their country.” Another air force planner asserted, “We wanted to let people know. Get rid of this guy and we’ll be more than happy to assist in rebuilding. We’re not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime. Fix that, and we’ll fix your electricity.”⁴³ In 1995, Colonel John A. Warden III wrote in Airpower Journal, “[Destruction] of these [electric power] facilities shut down water purification and sewage treatment plants. As a result, epidemics of gastroenteritis, cholera, and typhoid broke out, leading to perhaps as many as 100,000 civilian deaths and a doubling of the infant mortality rate.”⁴⁴ A team from the Harvard School of Public Health suggested in May 1991 that “at least 170,000 children under five years of age will die in the coming year from the delayed effects” of the bombing.⁴⁵

The bombing itself violated international humanitarian law and made the United States liable to charges of war crimes. Article 54 (2) of the “Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol 1), June 8, 1977,” explicitly states, “It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as food-stuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.”⁴⁶ As noted earlier, the United States is not a signatory of Protocol 1, but this does not absolve it of the charge that its behavior was profoundly immoral.

The sanctions themselves reinforced and deepened what the bombing began. Jacob Hornberger, president of the Future of Freedom Foundation, quotes State Department officials who helped negotiate U.N. support for our actions as saying that these were the “toughest, most comprehensive sanctions in history.”⁴⁷ On August 2, 1990, the United States and Britain obtained U.N. Security Council Resolution 661 freezing all of Iraq’s foreign assets and authorizing the cutting off of all trade. This embargo lasted until the Anglo-American invasion of 2003. In its history, the U.N. has imposed economic sanctions only fourteen times (twelve of them since 1990), but according to Joy Gordon, the leading authority on the subject, “only those sanctions on Iraq have been comprehensive, meaning that virtually every aspect of the country’s imports and exports is controlled.”⁴⁸ The American and British governments claimed not to have sequestered imports of food and medicine—hence Albright’s pretense that all Saddam Hussein had to do was comply with the U.N. to preserve the health of his people—but the two allies so restricted Iraqi exports that it had no money to buy such necessities. Columbia University professor Richard Garfield, an epidemiologist and one of the leading analysts of the effects of sanctions on Iraq, says that “Iraq’s legal foreign trade was cut by an estimated ninety percent by sanctions.”⁴⁹ In particular Iraq was not allowed to import any of the parts it needed to repair its electrical and water purification systems.

The United States and Britain went to extraordinary lengths to keep U.N. documentation of what was happening inside Iraq from being made public. But the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) nonetheless monitored the situation, and in 1995, its researchers wrote to the Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Society, that 567,000 Iraqi children were estimated to have died as a result of sanctions. That figure may have been an overestimate, but it led to the U.N.’s “oil for food” program in 1996, which was supposed to remedy shortages of food and medical supplies. It did not work out that way, however, because the U.N. banked the proceeds from the Iraqi oil sales it now permitted in New York and skimmed off 34 percent to pay Kuwaiti claims of war damage against Iraq as well as its own expenses. The United States insisted that a further 13 percent go to the Kurdish autonomous area in the north. There was thus much less money available than the public was led to believe.

In addition, the U.S. government reserved the right to veto or delay any items Iraq ordered, exercising that power often and in secret. As Joy Gordon, who teaches philosophy at Fairfield University and is a prolific writer on the Iraq sanctions, noted, “In September 2001 nearly one third of water and sanitation and one quarter of electricity and educational-supply contracts were on hold. Between the springs of 2000 and 2002, for example, holds on humanitarian goods tripled.” Among the items the United States stopped from entering Iraq in the winter of 2001 were dialysis, dental and firefighting equipment, water tankers, milk and yogurt production equipment, and printing machines for schools.⁵⁰

Anupama Rao Singh, the United Nations Children’s Fund representative in Baghdad, observed that food shortages were virtually unknown in Iraq before the sanctions, but that from 1991 to 1998, “children under five were dying from malnutrition-related diseases in numbers ranging from a conservative 2,600 per month to a more realistic 5,357 per month.”⁵¹ Using his 1999 study, “Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children,” as well as other studies and his own later recalculations, Richard Garfield estimated that, through 2000, the sanctions had killed approximately 350,000 Iraqi children.⁵² This is the most widely accepted figure today. When Denis Halliday, the United Nations coordinator in Iraq, resigned in 1998 to protest the effects of the sanctions, he condemned them as “a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq” and called their implementation “genocide.”⁵³ Given that the United States had starved the Iraqis for over a decade and caused the deaths of several hundred thousand of their children, one wonders why former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz and others believed American invading forces would be welcomed as liberators.

In the wake of 9/11, a new threat to civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan materialized in the form of random killings by America’s often poorly led and unaccountable armed forces. These victims were “shot by snipers, strafed by helicopters, buried under the rubble of their houses by bombs, incinerated by fire, and left to rot in the streets of cities like Fallujah [Iraq] to be gnawed on by dogs.”⁵⁴ The military keeps no public record on their numbers—what Boston Globe journalist Derrick Jackson calls “this atrocity of silence”—but the evidence indicates that in Iraq in the first years after the invasion such killings by Americans amount to between twice and ten times the people slain by insurgents’ bombs.

On June 2, 2005, the Iraqi Interior Ministry announced that, over the previous eighteen months, insurgent violence had claimed the lives of some 12,000 civilians, whereas the estimates of the numbers killed by the American military ranged from a low of 21,000 to over 40,000.⁵⁵ In July 2005, Dr. Hatim al-Alwani, head of the Iraqiyun humanitarian organization in Baghdad, released his group’s estimate that the total number of Iraqis killed from all causes since the U.S. invasion was 128,000, including those who died in the U.S. assaults on Fallujah. A year later, the American public began slowly to awaken to the U.S. military’s lax discipline in using lethal force against civilians. Serious cases of out-of-control marines executing the elderly, women, and children at Haditha, Ishaqi, and elsewhere amounted to the equivalent in Iraq of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.⁵⁶

William Langewiesche, a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, wrote from Baghdad, “However vicious or even sadistic the insurgents may be, they are acutely aware of their popular base, and are responsible for fewer unintentional ‘collateral’ casualties than are the clumsy and overarmed American forces.”⁵⁷ Dahr Jamail, one of the BBC’s correspondents in Iraq, reported, “Coalition and Iraqi security forces may be responsible for up to sixty percent of conflict-related civilian deaths in Iraq—far more than are killed by insurgents, confidential records obtained by the BBC’s Panorama programme reveal.... One of the least reported aspects of the U.S. occupation of Iraq is the oftentimes indiscriminate use of airpower by the American military.”⁵⁸

The American press only rarely, and then usually anecdotally, describes the deaths of civilians killed by American troops. American newspapers and television broadcasts routinely remove pictures of non-combatants killed by U.S. forces even though they do not flinch from showing the bodies of people killed by insurgents. One reason may be surmised from an October 2001 set of instructions a Florida newspaper issued to its staff: “DO NOT USE photos on page 1A showing civilian casualties from the war on Afghanistan. .. . DO NOT USE wire stories that lead with civilian casualties. . . . They should be mentioned further down in the story. If the story needs rewriting to play down the civilian casualties, DO IT.”⁵⁹ The American press has similarly never reported on the nightly use of “flash bombs” fired by Apache helicopters to light up the fields along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. These high-tech American bombs have burned thousands of acres of fields and decimated groves of date palms. Hovering helicopters have also made it impossible for Iraqis to sleep on rooftops in the sweltering summertime, as was their custom in order to escape the stifling heat.⁶⁰

There are no “official” statistics on this mayhem because, as former Centcom commander General Tommy Franks put it, “We do not do body counts.” (Franks was speaking of the war in Afghanistan but also making policy for the subsequent war in Iraq.) Such a statement signaled to the civilian populations of Afghanistan and Iraq that the United States did not care how many local citizens it killed. However, as Maria Ruzicka, an American peace activist who was killed on April 16, 2005, on the road to Baghdad International Airport, had discovered, it is also a lie. The U.S. military does do body counts, but only publicizes them when they are of propaganda value to the American side.⁶¹

American soldiers and contractors working in the war zones are authorized to use lethal force at their own discretion whenever they feel threatened. The soldiers are unaccountable for their acts to any authority except their military superiors, and the contractors are, so far as I can ascertain, simply unaccountable. The U.S. military itself invariably conducts its own investigations into any charges of excessive use of force, and these investigations are normally oriented toward covering up what happened. As one knowledgeable human rights observer in Iraq put matters, “The American troops have adopted an atmosphere of impunity. Arrogant and violent behavior goes unpunished and continues.”⁶² Patrick Cockburn, a journalist for the Independent of London with long experience in Iraq, adds, “Every Iraqi has stories of friends or relatives killed by U.S. troops for no adequate reason. Often they do not know if they were shot by regular soldiers or by members of western security companies whose burly employees, usually ex-soldiers, are everywhere in Iraq.”⁶³

In Afghanistan, there are relatively few unofficial estimates of the numbers of civilians killed by U.S. forces and no official ones. In December 2001, Robert Fisk, the veteran journalist of the Islamic world, reported that high-level bombing of Afghan villages by B-52s had claimed some 3,700 victims.⁶⁴ After that time, there were mostly reports of individual deaths, including a Red Cross account of 52 people, half of them children, killed by bombing in eastern Afghanistan on December 29, 2001; 16 villagers killed on January 23, 2002, by U.S. forces at Hazar Qadam; and 14, including women and children, killed when a U.S. jet attacked a vehicle on March 6, 2002, in eastern Paktia province.

On June 30, 2002, a U.S. AC-130 gunship attacked a cluster of six villages a hundred miles north of Kandahar in Uruzgan province. In the village of Karakak, the aircraft sprayed a wedding ceremony being held at night to escape the heat with hundreds of bullets. The Americans repeatedly claimed that their planes had come under antiaircraft fire and that they were only retaliating. However, a U.S. Special Forces investigation on the ground found no antiaircraft gun or expended cannon shells. What they did find were forty-eight bodies, all but three women and children. Afghan officials believed that the United States either relied on intelligence from Afghan informers who were perhaps settling personal scores or were simply shooting up the area in hopes of killing Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the overthrown Taliban regime, who was raised less than a mile from the village. The Americans later admitted the raid was a mistake and promised to build schools, roads, and hospitals and drill wells in the district but there is no evidence that they ever did so.⁶⁵ The “independent” Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly asked the U.S. military to obtain Afghan authorization before carrying out attacks, but American officials up to and including President Bush have refused all such requests.⁶⁶

American killings of civilians have been on a far greater scale in Iraq because that country is more populous and urbanized, and the war and insurgency there have proved much more intense than in Afghanistan. On October 28, 2004, physicians and other researchers affiliated with Johns Hopkins and Columbia Universities in the United States and the al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad published a report in the British medical journal the Lancet that concluded, “The risk of death from violence [in Iraq] in the period after the invasion was fifty-eight times higher than in the period before the war.... We think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths, and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths. . . . Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children.”⁶⁷

Some other nongovernmental analysts believe this estimate may be too high. The London-based group Iraq Body Count puts the total of civilians killed by foreign troops at between 34,711 and 38,861 as of May 1, 2006. However, it counts only deaths directly reported by the media or mentioned by official groups.⁶⁸ The Lancet’s estimate was based not only on an elaborate survey of households but on a comparison of mortality rates in the first nearly eighteen months after the invasion with the almost fifteen-month period preceding it. As the authors note, “The major causes of death before the invasion were myocardial infarction, cerebrovascular accidents, and other chronic disorders whereas after the invasion violence was the primary cause of death.” They excluded the city of Fallujah from their investigation because it was too dangerous to do research there. “We estimate that 98,000 more deaths than expected happened after the invasion outside Fallujah and far more if the outlier Fallujah cluster is included.”⁶⁹

During the “shock and awe” barrage of cruise missiles and other airborne weaponry that opened the war, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his aides planned to try to kill “high value targets” (HVTs), including Saddam Hussein and General Izzat Ibrahim, Iraq’s number two official. According to the plans, Rumsfeld personally had to sign off on any airstrike “thought likely to result in the deaths of more than thirty civilians.” The air war commander, Lieutenant General T. Michael Moseley, proposed fifty such raids and Rumsfeld signed the orders for each and every one.

As it turned out, none succeeded. The March 19, 2003, attempt to kill Saddam Hussein and his sons at the Dora Farms compound south of Baghdad was a major fiasco. American intelligence reported Saddam there in an underground bunker that would require particularly large bombs. He was not there, however, nor was any bunker, but the air force killed a lot of Iraqi civilians. Similarly, an April 7 raid in the Mansur district of Baghdad killed only innocent bystanders. The deaths accomplished nothing except to show off America s lethal, high-tech weaponry. Marc Garlasco, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who headed the “high-value targeting cell” within the Pentagon, described the entire campaign as an “abject failure” and added, “We failed to kill the HVTs and instead killed civilians and engendered hatred and discontent in some of the population.”⁷⁰

Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, commented on these and later destructive attacks, “American behavior and self-perceptions reveal the ease with which a civilized country can engage in large-scale killing of civilians without public discussion.... The American fantasy of a final battle, in Fallujah or elsewhere, or the capture of some terrorist mastermind, perpetuates a cycle of bloodletting that puts the world in peril. Worse still, American public opinion, media and the [2004] election victory of the Bush administration have left the world’s most powerful military without practical restraint.”⁷¹

As a second example of the administration s failure to think and make moral judgments, consider the global network of military prisons it has created in which inmates are routinely tortured. On May 17, 2004, the Army Times reported that around the halls of the Pentagon a caustic label had emerged for the enlisted soldiers shown in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison photos: “the six morons who lost the war.”⁷² I would suggest that there were actually seven morons, not six, and they were not enlisted men. The seven are President George W. Bush; his former legal counsel and subsequently attorney general of the United States Alberto Gonzales; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard B. Myers; Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq until mid-2004; Major General Geoffrey Miller, commander at Guantanamo until April 2004, when he took over Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; and Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Senator John W. Warner (Republican from Virginia).⁷³

These are the people who disgraced the United States and did nothing about it when the details of Abu Ghraib in particular began to be revealed to the public. As the Israeli court that sentenced Adolf Eichmann to death insisted: “The degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hand.”⁷⁴ This is as true in cases of official torture as it is for genocide.

President Bush was directly responsible for removing the legal restraints against torture. On the evening of September 11, 2001, in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he returned to Washington and at 8:30 p.m. addressed the nation from the Oval Office. Following his speech, he met with his senior officials concerned with the crisis in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. According to Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism chief for both Presidents Clinton and Bush, who was there, Bush entered the room and said, “I want you all to understand that we are at war and we will stay at war until this is done. Nothing else matters. Everything is available for the pursuit of this war. Any barriers in your way, they’re gone. Any money you need, you have it. This is our only agenda.” In the ensuing discussion, according to Clarke, “Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution. Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room. T don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’ “⁷⁵ As Timothy Garton Ash has observed, “We got off on the wrong foot on the very first day.”⁷⁶

Without question Secretary Rumsfeld heeded what the commander in chief told him. Later that autumn, during the interrogations of John Walker Lindh, our first post-9/11 torture victim, Rumsfeld instructed his legal counsel to order the military intelligence officials to “take the gloves off.” In the early stages of his interrogation under torture, Lindh’s responses were cabled to the Pentagon hourly followed by return orders to keep up the pressure.

Lindh was then a twenty-year-old, white, middle-class American citizen from Marin County, California, who had converted to Islam, gone to Yemen and Pakistan to study religious texts and Arabic, and traveled to Afghanistan in August 2001, barely a month before the 9/11 attacks. The CIA found him, badly wounded, in a prison of one of the Northern Alliance warlords, our allies in the war against the Taliban.

His American captors stripped and humiliated him, denied him medical treatment, and tortured him for information about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. According to Richard A. Serrano of the Los Angeles Times, who was shown secret military documents detailing the treatment of Lindh, he “was being questioned while he was propped up naked and tied to a stretcher in interrogation sessions that went on for days.”⁷⁷ Attorney General John Ashcroft threatened to try Lindh as a traitor but in the end settled for a guilty plea on charges of aiding the Taliban and a twenty-year sentence rather than let Lindh’s lawyers seek testimony from captives held at Guantanamo about his torture. As part of his plea bargain, Lindh was forced to sign a statement saying: “The defendant agrees that this agreement puts to rest his claims of mistreatment by the United States military, and all claims of mistreatment are withdrawn. The defendant acknowledges that he was not intentionally mistreated by the U.S. military.” As journalist Dave Lindorff observes, Lindh “remains almost certainly wrongfully imprisoned.”⁷⁸

Thus began practices that would ultimately infect and contaminate virtually all aspects of the “war on terror.” Thanks to the research of Alfred W. McCoy, who has studied the history of U.S. government torture and the CIA’s application of it from the early days of the Cold War, its use was not unknown in American clandestine operations.⁷⁹ In collaboration with the British, the CIA invented new forms of mental torture that relied on inducing terror, which often did irreversible psychological damage, in addition to such techniques as “water-boarding” or what our Latin American military allies call the “submarino.” It involves being held under water until you think you will die. There was, however, great nervousness about using these techniques because laws and international treaties passed and signed during the middle and late years of the Cold War had clearly made torture a crime. Bush and Rumsfeld ordered these restraints removed, and all the old methods were soon back in use in Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba, and at secret CIA prisons around the world.

Bush’s responsibility for legalizing torture came in two key decisions. The first was his September 17, 2001, Memorandum of Agreement, or “finding”—jargon for a presidential directive authorizing a particular CIA covert operation. This vastly expanded the CIA’s activities worldwide, including its payments to the Northern Alliance warlords in Afghanistan to resume the civil war against the Taliban with American air support. Bush also authorized the global pursuit of al-Qaeda “permitting the CIA to conduct covert operations [in some eighty countries] without having to come back for formal approval for each specific operation” and—most important—removed ail constraints and safeguards over the CIA’s already existing program of “extraordinary rendition.”⁸⁰

The latter term is a euphemism for abducting people anywhere on Earth, including inside the United States, and secretly flying them to countries whose police and intelligence personnel are more than happy to torture them for us or where the United States runs its own secret prisons for doing so. Such countries and territories reportedly have included Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Diego Garcia, Pakistan, and unidentified Eastern European nations. The military or the CIA also run some twenty-five prisons in Afghanistan and seventeen in Iraq.⁸¹ Rendition is a violation of international law, since the U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted December 10, 1984, and ratified by the U. S. Congress in October 1994, specifically says, “No state . . . shall expel, return, or extradite a person to another state where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” The Geneva Conventions also contain articles stipulating the same prohibition.⁸²

Bush’s most fateful decision on torture, however, came in a presidential memorandum drafted by John C. Yoo, a University of California law professor who was serving in the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice, and endorsed by Alberto Gonzales, then counsel to the president. Dated January 18, 2002, the memo was (without evident irony) entitled “Humane Treatment of al-Qaeda and Taliban Detainees.” On February 7, it was disseminated to the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the attorney general, the director of the CIA, the national security adviser, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to the memo, captives from the battlefields of Afghanistan need not be given prisoner-of-war status and the U.S. government would therefore not abide by the provisions of the Geneva Conventions governing prisoners of war.⁸³ This key decision opened the door to the torture of captives at Bagram Air Base in Kabul, Afghanistan, then at Guantanamo naval base, Cuba, and most infamously at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Why did Bush do it? It was, in a sense, an admission of guilt. Once he got caught up in his own rhetoric about the “global war on terror” and had issued orders to the CIA and military to act secretly against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, I believe he felt that he had to protect his agents from being charged under the federal War Crimes Act, a 1996 law that carries the death penalty. By declaring captives to be “illegal combatants,” a term that does not exist in international law, and asserting that the Geneva Conventions simply did not apply to them, he freed his agents to torture and do as they pleased. As one intelligence official told New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh, “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’“⁸⁴

Had the president restricted his target explicitly to the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, which had carried out the 9/11 attacks, and moved against it through law enforcement means, the Geneva Conventions would indeed not have come into play and the whole issue of torture could have been avoided. He would have received global cooperation (including from the governments of most Middle Eastern countries) and would surely have been more successful in countering the threat of terrorism than through the route he actually chose. There is widespread agreement among officials in the field, including FBI agents stationed at Guantanamo, that information extracted under torture is usually worthless, that torture largely compels its victims to say what the torturer wants to hear, and that the use of torture precludes building a legal case against a particular captive. Moreover, the people rounded up in Afghanistan usually did not have valuable information, since most of them had been turned over to the Americans by Northern Alliance warlords for the bounties the United States was paying.⁸⁵ In October 2004, the deputy commander at Guantanamo, Brigadier General Martin Lucent, said to the press that most of his 550 prisoners had revealed nothing of value: “Most of these guys weren’t fighting, they were running.”⁸⁶

The president seems to have authorized torture largely for its symbolic value—the desire of his administration and its neoconservative backers to show the world that the United States was indeed a new Rome, that it could act with impunity unchecked by any established norms of international law. It was the first sign of the administrations determination to overawe the world with American power, soon enough embodied in the new strategy of “shock and awe”—the name the military gave its opening cruise missile and bombing salvos against Baghdad in March 20 03.⁸⁷ Bush himself said to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, “I had to show the American people the resolve of a commander in chief that [sic] was going to do whatever it took to win. No yielding. No equivocation. No, you know, lawyering this thing to death, that we’re after ‘em. And that was not only for domestic, for the people at home to see. It was also vitally important for the rest of the world to watch.”⁸⁸

“There are only two ways to govern,” writes Naomi Klein, the award-winning Canadian journalist, “with consent or with fear.”⁸⁹ Under George Bush, the United States decided to rule Afghanistan and Iraq through fear, and from this naturally followed disappearances without charges, indefinite detentions, torture, and “extraordinary renditions.” David Brooks, the right-wing pundit for Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Times, accurately predicted that after 9/11: “We will care a lot more about ends—winning the war—than we will about means. We will debate whether it is necessary to torture prisoners who have information about future biological attacks. We will destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders, and continue fighting. In an age of conflict, bourgeois values like compassion, tolerance, and industriousness are valued less than the classical virtues of courage, steadfastness, and a ruthless desire for victory.”⁹⁰

The president’s indispensable partner in these operations was his then legal counsel (subsequently attorney general) Alberto Gonzales. In order to protect the president from being charged with illegally ordering the torture of captives, Gonzales gathered around him a remarkable coterie of right-wing lawyers from various branches of the government. These included the Korean-American scholar John Yoo, then assistant attorney general; Timothy Flanigan, deputy counsel to the president; Patrick F. Philbin, deputy assistant attorney general; William J. Haynes, general counsel for the Department of Defense; and Jay S. Bybee, assistant attorney general.⁹¹ With sophistry and ideological fervor these legal specialists prepared briefs—”torture memos”—for the president and the secretary of defense claiming, among other things, that “[i]n order to respect the President’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign, [the statutory prohibition against torture] must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority. Congress lacks authority under Article I [of the Constitution] to set the terms and conditions under which the President may exercise his authority as Commander-in-Chief to control the conduct of operations during a war.”⁹² In fact, article 1, section 8 of the Constitution expressly states: “The Congress shall have Power to declare War and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.”

As Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel, editors of The Torture Papers and leading authorities on these machinations, argue, “The ‘torture memos’ ... deliberately disregard, even nullify, the balance-of-powers doctrine that has defined the United States since its inception.”⁹³ Harold Hongju Koh, dean of Yale University’s law school and a former assistant secretary of state, says, “The notion that the president has the constitutional power to permit torture is like saying he has the constitutional power to commit genocide.... It’s just erroneous legal analysis.”⁹⁴ Gonzales’s lawyers nonetheless argued for a “unitary executive” theory of presidential power, which essentially suggests that, in time of war (as they also insisted the president’s self-proclaimed “war on terror” was), the president as commander in chief has almost uncontestable powers to do more or less as he pleases, whatever Congress or the courts may say.

Perhaps the most shortsighted aspect of this claim to absolute presidential power is that it leads unavoidably to the president’s liability under the concept of “command responsibility”—the doctrine that a military commander is legally liable for all abuses and atrocities committed by his troops whether he knows about them or not. After World War II, the United States put Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita, the so-called Tiger of Malaya and subsequently commander of Japanese forces in the Philippines, on trial. A U.S. war crimes tribunal found that he had failed to uphold “command responsibility” for his troops, who had massacred thousands of innocent civilians in Manila in early 1945, even though the defense established that he had no knowledge of the crimes. Because Yamashita was tried by a military court, he appealed his case directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld his conviction by a vote of 5 to 3, thereby establishing the doctrine of command responsibility in American law. Justice Frank Murphy warned in dissent, “In the sober afterglow will come the realization of the boundless and dangerous implications of the procedure sanctioned today.... Indeed, the fate of some future President of the United States and his chief of staff and military advisers may well have been sealed by this decision.” In other words, American constitutional law already establishes the grounds on which President Bush could be held accountable for his failure to exercise command responsibility in cases of torture at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere.⁹⁵

As Justice Murphy suggested, the issue of command responsibility applies equally well to the president’s underlings, Secretary Rumsfeld and Generals Myers, Sanchez, and Miller. Rumsfeld’s potential liability is, however, greater than just being the highest official in charge of the Department of Defense who failed to stop torture when he learned about it.⁹⁶ According to the journalist Seymour Hersh, in late 2001, Rumsfeld personally created a highly secret “special access program” (SAP) that directed American special forces units to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate high-value targets. Code-named “Copper Green,” the SAP “encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence” and was at the root of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Both President Bush and General Myers were fully informed about these operations.⁹⁷

In addition, Rumsfeld personally reviewed and signed off on many of the techniques of humiliation, abuse, and torture that would be brought into play at the American prison at Guantanamo. In one case, in a November 27, 2002, memo on acceptable interrogation methods, he personally scribbled in the margins: “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing [as a technique at Guantanamo] limited to 4 hours?”⁹⁸ Of course, Rumsfeld was not naked and handcuffed when he stood working at his upright desk in the Pentagon.

In December 2003, before army investigators received the first photos of torture practices at Abu Ghraib, now retired colonel Stuart A. Huntington reported to the generals in Iraq that units of Army Rangers, members of Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and other special forces working with the CIA were torturing their detainees. Major General Barbara Fast, the highest-ranking intelligence official in Iraq, had commissioned Huntington, a veteran of the murderous counterinsurgency Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War, which was the model for Rumsfeld’s SAP, to look into charges of abuse by Copper Green operatives. Huntington concluded that such measures would imperil rather than aid U.S. efforts to quell the Iraqi insurgency. When Huntington was told by one officer at a high-value-target detention center in Baghdad that prisoners taken by the highly classified units showed signs of having been beaten, he asked whether the officer had alerted his superiors to the problem. The reply was, “Everyone knows about it.”⁹⁹

When on May 6, 2004, the press questioned Rumsfeld about his responsibility for widespread military torture in Afghanistan and Iraq, he replied, “My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture.... Therefore I’m not going to address the torture word.”¹⁰⁰ Unfortunately, Rumsfeld’s attempt to trivialize what he had authorized did not cause the problem to disappear. It only got worse and ultimately implicated the high command.

All the torture took place during General Richard Myers’s term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He knew and approved of everything that was done, including a December 2002 list of new interrogation techniques signed off on by Rumsfeld that were to be used on al-Qaeda captives held at Guantanamo Bay. These techniques included sleep and food deprivation, degrading treatment such as having female soldiers in their underwear grab and kick detainees’ genitals and rub their breasts against them, insulting detainees’ religious beliefs by having women smear them with fake menstrual blood, and using agonizing “stress positions” to try to get them to talk.¹⁰¹

After the torture photos were turned over to army criminal investigators, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the senior military commander in Iraq, appointed Major General Antonio M. Taguba to investigate the situation at Abu Ghraib. Given army standards of inspecting itself that prevailed in Iraq at that time, General Taguba conducted an unusually thorough and unbiased examination. He documented numerous incidents between October and December 2003 of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton abuses.”¹⁰² General Myers, who was both Sanchez’s and Taguba’s superior, reacted to the investigation by, first, trying to prevent details of the torture at Abu Ghraib from being released to the American public and then claiming that he had simply been too busy to get around to reading Taguba’s report. In April 2004, Myers called Dan Rather, the CBS News anchorman, and persuaded him not to break the story of the Abu Ghraib tortures for at least two weeks, and in May, four months after Taguba’s report had been completed, Myers told Fox News that he had still not read it.¹⁰³

General Myers was certainly aware of another January 2004 internal army report of abuses committed by the army’s 101st Airborne Division in December in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. The army kept this document secret until March 25, 2005, when it was released under a Freedom of Information Act suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The 101st Airborne’s behavior is important because it demonstrates that the acts of abuse and torture going on at Abu Ghraib were not—in one of General Myers’s favorite phrases—the work of a few “bad apples.” The January 2004 report is also among the few internal documents that directly charge the military with using torture. It says, “There is evidence that suggests 311th MI [the 311th Military Intelligence Battalion] personnel and/or translators engaged in physical torture of the detainees.” The investigating officer, whose name was blacked out of the released documents, wrote that the guards at the Mosul facility came from three infantry units of the 101st Airborne and “were poorly trained and encouraged to abuse prisoners.”¹⁰⁴ No one in the division was punished for the abuses over which General Myers held command responsibility, as he did for the cover-up that lasted until the ACLU intervened.

Given his overall command of the armed forces, General Myers was also directly responsible for setting up the torture regime at the Guantanamo prison and then exporting it to Iraq. The first commandant at Guantanamo after 9/11 was Brigadier General Rick Baccus, an officer in the Rhode Island National Guard. He ran the facility as a conventional prisoner-of-war camp, which irritated Pentagon civilian officials, who wanted to implement a whole list of aggressive new interrogation techniques.¹⁰⁵ In October 2002, General Myers removed General Baccus, allegedly for “coddling” detainees, and replaced him with Major General Geoffrey Miller, a former artillery officer who had never before held a post connected in any way to intelligence work; and yet Miller was now ordered to increase the flow of “actionable intelligence” from Guantanamo.

In pursuit of this, General Miller introduced direct assaults on prisoners, prolonged shackling in uncomfortable positions, loud music, sexual humiliation, the threat of dogs, and many other forms of torment. FBI agents who were assigned to Guantanamo were alarmed by what they witnessed there and reported back to Washington via classified e-mails (some of which the ACLU was able to have declassified):” ‘On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water,’ the FBI agent wrote on August 2, 2004. ‘Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more.’ In one case, the agent continued, ‘the detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night.’ “¹⁰⁶

The result was that the inspectors of the International Committee of the Red Cross accused the U.S. military of using tactics “tantamount to torture” on captives held at Guantanamo Bay.¹⁰⁷ At the same time, these methods failed to produce good intelligence. Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Christino, an intelligence officer at the Pentagon with twenty years’ experience, told David Rose, author of Guantanamo: The War on Human Rights, “Most of the information derived from interrogations at Guantanamo appears to be very general in nature; so general that it is not very useful.” According to Christino, Guantanamo had not helped to prevent a single terrorist attack.¹⁰⁸

In August 2003, the Pentagon sent General Miller to conduct a ten-day review of prison facilities in Iraq. While there, he talked directly to junior commanders and gave them copies of a manual of procedures used at Guantanamo. Although he has repeatedly claimed that he instructed American officers in charge of the Iraqi prisons that the Geneva Conventions did apply there, even if not in Guantanamo, much harsher procedures began to be implemented at Abu Ghraib soon after his departure. According to Brigadier General Janis L. Karpinski, then commandant at Abu Ghraib, “Miller came up there and told me he was going to ‘Gitmoize’ the detention operations.”¹⁰⁹

On September 14, 2003, a month after General Miller had returned to Cuba, General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq, signed a memo putting Miller’s program at Guantanamo into general practice. Sanchez authorized twenty-nine interrogation techniques, including twelve that exceeded limits in the army’s own field manual and four that he admitted probably violated international law, the Geneva Conventions, and accepted standards on the humane treatment of prisoners. Sanchez’s highly classified memo was released to the public only after a Freedom of Information suit by the ACLU. On the basis of this memo, the ACLU formally asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to investigate Sanchez—whom Hispanic magazine had just named as 2004’s “Hispanic of the Year”—for perjury. In an appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 19, 2004, General Sanchez had said under oath, “I never approved any of those measures to be used ... at any time in the last year.”¹¹⁰

Needless to say, nothing came of the ACLU’s request and the army soon exonerated General Sanchez of all responsibility for the horrors of Abu Ghraib. Nonetheless, on May 2, 2006, the ACLU released a new document it had obtained from the inspector general of the Defense Intelligence Agency under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Dated May 19, 2004, the same day as Sanchez’s Senate testimony, and marked “secret,” the document reports an earlier official investigation into General Sanchez’s role in the Abu Ghraib abuses. It says that he had ordered military inter- rogators to “go to the outer limits” to extract information from prisoners, adding that “HQ [headquarters] wanted the interrogators to break the detainees.”¹¹¹

On March 22, 2004, after seventeen months at Guantanamo, General Miller was put in charge of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He did not stay there long, however, because on November 24, 2004, he was reassigned to be assistant chief of staff for installation management for the army, a desk job back in the Pentagon. On July 1, 2004, the Pentagon also relieved General Sanchez after fifteen months as the top general in Iraq and returned him to his old assignment as commander of the army’s Fifth Corps in Germany. He was replaced in Baghdad by a four-star general, George Casey. In June 2005, the New York Times reported that army superiors believed the Abu Ghraib torture scandal had blown over and were thinking about promoting Sanchez to four stars and giving him the Southern Command in Latin America.¹¹² However, the possibility of a clash with Congress prevented any further promotions for Sanchez.¹¹³ Meanwhile, General Taguba, who had done the initial investigating at Abu Ghraib, was shunted aside, being transferred to the Pentagon and made deputy assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs.

Since the publication of the first photos from Abu Ghraib, the Pentagon has conducted at least ten high-level investigations of itself. In April 2005, the army’s inspector general issued a report that was intended to be the military’s final word on the responsibility of the senior leadership. The entire high command, civilian and military, was exonerated except for Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, a woman and a reserve officer, who was briefly in charge of U.S. prisons in Iraq in late 2003 and early 2004. She received an administrative reprimand and was demoted to colonel.¹¹⁴ As of the summer of 2006, only seven low-ranking soldiers had been charged with anything.

When the issue of official torture first arose, Senator John W. Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, promised that everyone culpable would be held accountable, but he failed to follow through, thereby earning himself a place among the seven morons who lost the war. The Washington Post editorialized, “That the affair would end in this way is even more disgraceful for the American political system than the abuses themselves.”¹¹⁵ But there was still one more disgrace to come. In June 2005, the Senate Republican Policy Committee issued a report claiming that the International Committee of the Red Cross, in daring to criticize U.S. treatment of prisoners in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay, had “lost its way.” The senators of the ruling party recommended that the Bush administration cut off all U.S. funds for the ICRC’s operations.¹¹⁶

Burton J. Lee III served as a doctor in the Army Medical Corps and, for four years, as presidential physician to George H. W. Bush. He writes, “Today, ... it seems as though our government and the military have slipped into Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’ The widespread reports of torture and ill-treatment—frequently based on military and government documents—defy the claim that this abusive behavior is limited to a few noncommissioned officers at Abu Ghraib or isolated incidents at Guantanamo Bay. When it comes to torture, the military’s traditional leadership and discipline have been severely compromised up and down the chain of command. Why? I fear it is because the military has bowed to errant civilian leadership.”¹¹⁷ I believe it is fair to suggest that this civilian leadership is suffering from the same lapses in thinking that afflicted the German desk murderers of the 1940s.

A third example of the administration’s inability to think can be found in its criminal attitude toward and treatment of Iraq’s greatest cultural treasures. In the months before he ordered the invasion of Iraq, George Bush and his senior officials spoke of preserving Iraq’s “patrimony” for the Iraqi people. What he meant by patrimony, at a time when talking about Iraqi oil was taboo, was exactly that—Iraqi oil. In their “joint statement on Iraq’s future” of April 8, 2003, George Bush and Tony Blair declared, “We reaffirm our commitment to protect Iraq’s natural resources, as the patrimony of the people of Iraq, which should be used only for their benefit.”¹¹⁸ In this they were true to their word. Among the few places American soldiers actually did guard during and in the wake of their invasion were that country’s oil fields and the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. The real Iraqi patrimony, that invaluable human inheritance of thousands of years, was another matter. At a time when American pundits were warning of a future “clash of civilizations,” our occupation forces were letting perhaps the greatest of all human patrimonies be looted and smashed.

There have been many dispiriting sights on TV since George Bush launched his ill-starred war on Iraq—the pictures from Abu Ghraib, Fallujah laid waste, American soldiers kicking down the doors of private homes and pointing assault rifles at women and children. But few have reverberated historically like the looting of Baghdad’s National Museum— or been forgotten more quickly in this country.

In archaeological circles, Iraq is known as the “cradle of civilization,” with a record of cultural artifacts going back more than seven thousand years. William R. Polk, the founder of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, says, “It was there, in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, that life as we know it today began: there people first began to speculate on philosophy and religion, developed concepts of international trade, made ideas of beauty into tangible forms, and, above all, developed the skill of writing.”¹¹⁹ No other places in the Bible except for Israel have more history and prophecy associated with them than Babylonia, Shinar (Sumer), and Mesopotamia (which in Greek means “between the [Tigris and Euphrates] rivers”)—different names for parts of the territory that the British around the time of World War I began to call “Iraq.”¹²⁰ Most of the early books of Genesis are set in Iraq (see Genesis 10:10,11:31; also Daniel 1-4; II Kings 24). There was, however, no country of “Iraq” until 1920, when the British combined the three Ottoman provinces of Basra, Mosul, and Baghdad and set up the puppet Faisal dynasty to govern their new domain. Britain dominated Iraqi affairs until 1958, when the last king, Faisal II, was overthrown and executed by Iraqi nationalists.

The best known of the civilizations that make up Iraq’s cultural heritage are the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Sassanids, and Muslims. On April 10, 2003, in a television address, President Bush acknowledged that the Iraqi people are “the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity.”¹²¹ Only two days later, under the complacent eyes of the occupying U.S. Army in Baghdad, the Iraqis would begin to lose that heritage in a swirl of looting and burning.

In September 2004, in one of the few self-critical reports to come out of Donald Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense, the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication wrote, “The larger goals of U.S. strategy depend on separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists. But American efforts have not only failed in this respect: they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended.”¹²² Nowhere was this failure more apparent than in the indifference—even glee—shown by Rumsfeld and his generals toward the looting on April 11 and 12, 2003, of the National Museum in Baghdad and the burning on April 14, 2003, of the National Library and Archives as well as the Library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Endowments. These events were, according to Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, “the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years.” Eleanor Robson, a specialist in the history of mathematics in the ancient Near East and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, said, “You’d have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale.”¹²³ Yet Secretary Rumsfeld compared the looting to the aftermath of a soccer game and shrugged it off with the comment that “Freedom’s untidy.... Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes.”¹²⁴

The National Museum of Baghdad has long been regarded as perhaps the richest archaeological institution in the Middle East. It is difficult to say with precision what was lost there in those catastrophic April days in 2003 because up-to-date inventories of its holdings, many never even described in archaeological journals, were also destroyed by the looters or remained incomplete thanks to conditions in Baghdad after the Gulf War of 1991. One of the best records, however partial, of its holdings is the catalog of items the museum lent in 1988 to an exhibition held in Japan’s ancient capital of Nara entitled “Silk Road Civilizations.” But as one museum official said to John Burns of the New York Times after the looting, “All gone, all gone. All gone in two days.”¹²⁵

A single, beautifully illustrated, indispensable book edited by Milbry Polk and Angela M. H. Schuster, The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia, represents the heartbreaking attempt of over a dozen archaeological specialists on ancient Iraq to specify what objects were in the museum before the catastrophe, where they had been excavated, and the condition of those few thousand items that have been recovered.

At a conference on art crimes held in London a year after the disaster, the British Museum’s John Curtis reported that at least half of the 40 most important stolen objects had not been retrieved and that, of some 15,000 items looted from the museum’s showcases and storerooms, about 8,000 had yet to be traced. Its entire collection of 5,800 cylinder seals and clay tablets, many containing cuneiform writing and other inscriptions some of which go back to the earliest discovery of writing itself, was stolen.¹²⁶ Since then, as a result of an amnesty for looters, about 4,000 of the artifacts have been recovered in Iraq, and more than 1,000 have been confiscated in the United States.¹²⁷ Curtis noted that random checks of Western soldiers leaving Iraq had led to the discovery of several in illegal possession of ancient objects. Customs agents in the United States found more. Officials in Jordan have impounded about 2,000 pieces smuggled from Iraq; in France, 500 pieces; in Italy, 300; in Syria, 300; and in Switzerland, 250. Smaller numbers have been seized in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. None of these objects has as yet been sent back to Baghdad.

The 616 pieces that form the famous collection of “Nimrud gold,” excavated by the Iraqis in the late 1980s from the tombs of the Assyrian queens at Nimrud, a few miles southeast of Mosul, were saved, but only because the museum had secretly moved them to the subterranean vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq at the time of the first Gulf War. By the time the Americans got around to protecting the bank in 2003, its building was a burned-out shell filled with twisted metal beams from the collapse of the roof and all nine floors under it. Nonetheless, the underground compartments and their contents survived undamaged. On July 3, 2003, a small portion of the Nimrud holdings were put on display for a few hours, allowing a handful of Iraqi officials to see them for the first time since 1990.¹²⁸

The torching of books and manuscripts in the Library of Korans and the National Library was a historical disaster of the first order. Most of the Ottoman imperial documents and the old royal archives concerning the creation of Iraq were reduced to ashes. According to Humberto Márquez, the Venezuelan author of Historia Universal de la Destrucción de los Libros, about a million books and ten million documents were destroyed by the fires of April 14, 2003.¹²⁹ Robert Fisk, correspondent of the Independent of London, was in Baghdad the day of the fires. He rushed to the offices of the U.S. Marines’ Civil Affairs Bureau and gave the officer on duty a precise map locating the two archives and their names in Arabic and English. The smoke, he pointed out, could be seen from three miles away. The officer shouted to a colleague, “This guy says some biblical library is on fire,” but the Americans did nothing to try to put out the flames.¹³⁰

Given the black market value of ancient art objects, U.S. military leaders had been warned before the invasion that the looting of all thirteen national museums throughout the country would be a particularly grave danger in the days after they captured Baghdad and took control of Iraq. In the chaos that followed the Gulf War of 1991, vandals had stolen about 4,000 objects from nine different regional museums. In monetary terms, the illegal trade in antiquities is the third most lucrative form of international trade globally, exceeded only by drug smuggling and arms sales.¹³¹ Given the richness of Iraq’s past, there are also over 10,000 significant archaeological sites scattered across the country, only some 1,500 of which have been studied. Following the Gulf War, a number of them were illegally excavated and their artifacts sold to unscrupulous international collectors in Western countries and Japan. All this was known to American commanders.

In January 2003, an American delegation of scholars, museum directors, art collectors, and antiquities dealers met with officials at the Pentagon to discuss the forthcoming invasion. They specifically warned that Baghdad’s National Museum was the single most important site in the country. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute said, “I thought I was given assurances that sites and museums would be protected.”¹³² Gibson went back to the Pentagon twice to discuss the dangers, and he and his colleagues sent several e-mail reminders to military officers in the weeks before the war began. However, a more ominous indicator of things to come was reported in the Guardian on April 14, 2003: rich American collectors with connections to the White House were busy “persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects Iraq’s heritage by prevention of sales abroad.” On January 24, 2003, some sixty New York-based collectors and dealers organized themselves into a new group called the “American Council for Cultural Policy” and met with Bush administration and Pentagon officials to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq should have relaxed antiquities laws.¹³³ Opening up private trade in Iraqi artifacts, they suggested, would offer such items better security than they could receive in Iraq.

The main international legal safeguard for historically and humanistically important institutions and sites is The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, signed on May 14, 1954. The United States is not a party to that convention, primarily because, during the Cold War, it feared that the treaty might restrict its freedom to engage in nuclear war, but during the 1991 Gulf War the elder Bush’s administration accepted the convention’s rules and abided by a “no-fire target list” of places where valuable cultural items were known to exist.¹³⁴ UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and other guardians of cultural artifacts expected the younger Bush’s administration to follow the same procedures in the 2003 war.

Moreover, on March 26, 2003, the Pentagon’s Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) headed by Lieutenant General (ret.) Jay Garner, the civil authority the United States had set up for the moment hostilities ceased, sent to all senior U.S. commanders a list of sixteen institutions that “merit securing as soon as possible to prevent further damage, destruction, and/or pilferage of records and assets.” The five-page memo dispatched two weeks before the fall of Baghdad also said, “Coalition forces must secure these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable loss of cultural treasures” and that “looters should be arrested/detained.” First on General Garner’s list of places to protect was the Central Bank of Iraq, which is now a ruin; second was the National Museum of Iraq; sixteenth was the Oil Ministry, one of only two places that U.S. forces occupying Baghdad actually defended (the other was the Interior Ministry). Martin Sullivan, chair of the President’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for the previous eight years, and Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and a member of the committee, both resigned to protest the failure of Centcom to obey orders. Sullivan said it was “inexcusable” that the museum should not have had the same priority as the Oil Ministry.¹³⁵

As we now know, the American forces made no effort to prevent the looting of the great cultural institutions of Iraq. Its soldiers, often stationed nearby, simply watched vandals enter and torch the buildings. Professor Said Arjomand, an editor of the journal Studies on Persianate Societies and a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, wrote, “Our troops, who have been proudly guarding the Oil Ministry, where no window is broken, deliberately condoned these horrendous events.”¹³⁶ American commanders claim that, to the contrary, they were too busy fighting and had too few troops to protect the museum and libraries. However, this seems to be an unlikely explanation. During the battle for Baghdad, the U.S. military was perfectly willing to dispatch some two thousand troops to secure northern Iraq’s oil fields, and their record on antiquities did not improve when the fighting subsided. At the six-thousand-year-old Sumerian city of Ur with its massive ziggurat, or stepped temple tower (built in the period 2112-2095 BC, and restored by Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century BC), the marines spray-painted their motto, Semper Fi (semper fidelis, “always faithful”), onto its walls.¹³⁷ The military then made the monument “off limits” to everyone in order to disguise the desecration that had occurred there, including the looting by U.S. soldiers of clay bricks used in the construction of the ancient buildings.

Until April 2003, the area around Ur, in the environs of Nasiriyah, was remote and sacrosanct. However, the U.S. military chose the land immediately adjacent to the ziggurat to build its huge Tallil Air Base with two runways, measuring 12,000 and 9,700 feet respectively, and four satellite camps. In the process, military engineers moved more than 9,500 truck-loads of dirt in order to build 350,000 square feet of hangars and other facilities for aircraft and Predator unmanned drones. They completely ruined the area, the literal heartland of human civilization, for any further archaeological research or future tourism. They did, however, erect their own American imperial ziggurats. On October 24, 2003, according to the Global Security Organization, the army and air force “opened its second Burger King at Tallil. The new facility, co-located with [a] ... Pizza Hut, provides another Burger King restaurant so that more service men and women serving in Iraq can, if only for a moment, forget about the task at hand in the desert and get a whiff of that familiar scent that takes them back home.”¹³⁸

The great British archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan (husband of Agatha Christie), who pioneered the excavations at Ur, Nineveh, and Nimrud, quotes some classical advice that the Americans might have been wise to heed: “There was danger in disturbing ancient monuments.... It was both wise and historically important to reverence the legacies of ancient times. Ur was a city infested with ghosts of the past and it was prudent to appease them.” ¹³⁹

The American record elsewhere in Iraq is no better. At Babylon, American and Polish forces built a military depot, despite objections from archaeologists. John Curtis, the British Museum’s authority on Iraq’s many archaeological sites, reported that, on a visit in December 2004, he saw “cracks and gaps where somebody had tried to gouge out the decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate” and a “2,600-year-old brick pavement crushed by military vehicles.”¹⁴⁰ Other observers say that the dust stirred up by U.S. helicopters has sandblasted the fragile brick facade of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon from 605 to 562 BC.¹⁴¹ The archaeologist Zainab Bahrani reports, “Between May and August 2004, the wall of the Temple of Nabu and the roof of the Temple of Ninmah, both of the sixth century BC, collapsed as a result of the movement of helicopters. Nearby, heavy machines and vehicles stand parked on the remains of a Greek theater from the era of Alexander of Macedon [Alexander the Great].”¹⁴²

In another example of American indifference to the Iraqi environment, the Marine Corps air base known as “Tikrit South” is located next door to a vast preserve where Saddam Hussein kept a herd of gazelles. The marines shot and ate the gazelles as a supplement to their prepackaged Meals Ready to Eat (MREs). Corporal Joshua Wicksell of Corpus Christi, Texas, declared freshly cooked gazelle to be delicious.¹⁴³ And none of this even begins to deal with the massive, ongoing looting of historical sites across Iraq by freelance grave and antiquities robbers, preparing to stock the living rooms of Western collectors. The unceasing chaos and lack of security brought to Iraq in the wake of our invasion have meant that a future, peaceful Iraq may hardly have a patrimony to display. It is no small accomplishment of the Bush administration to have plunged the cradle of the human past into the same sort of chaos and lack of security as the Iraqi present. If amnesia is bliss, then the fate of Iraq’s antiquities represents a kind of modern paradise.

Heavens Command: An Imperial Progress (1973)

The English-speaking peoples are past masters in the art of concealing their selfish national interests in the guise of the general good.... This kind of hypocrisy is a special and characteristic peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon mind.

—E. H. CARR,

quoted by Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows (1996)

Two weeks after George Bush’s re-election as president in November 2004, Porter J. Goss, the newly appointed director of central intelligence (DCI), wrote an internal memorandum to all employees that said in part, “[Our job is to] support the administration and its policies in our work. As agency employees, we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.”¹ Translated from bureaucratese, this directive essentially passes the following message to the CIA’s employees: “You have always worked for the White House. I’m just reminding you of that fact. The intelligence you produce must first and foremost protect the president from being held accountable for anything he has done, ordered, or said concerning Iraq, Osama bin Laden, preventive war, torturing captives, the ‘war on terror,’ or any other subject on which critics might challenge him.”

As it turns out, much of the information the Central Intelligence Agency had already produced on these subjects was false, misleading, or carefully circumscribed by administration needs and desires, as were key intelligence estimates derived from fabrications inspired by the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense. Goss was merely trying to warn, and so head off, the increasing numbers of outraged, courageous CIA truth tellers who were leaking information harmful to the president before going down in flames. As Thomas Powers, an authority on the CIA, reminds us, “No one can understand, much less predict, the behavior of the CIA who does not understand that the agency works for the president. I know of no exceptions to this general rule. In practice it means that in the end the CIA will always bend to the wishes of the president.... The general rule applies both to intelligence and to operations: what the CIA says, as well as what it does, will shape itself over time to what the president wants.”²

Since everything the CIA writes and does is secret, including its budget (regardless of article 1, section 9, of the Constitution, which says “a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time”), accountability to the elected representatives of the people or even an accurate historical record of actions is today inconceivable. Congressional oversight of the agency— and many other, ever-expanding intelligence outfits in the U.S. government, including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA)—is, at best, a theatrical performance designed to distract and mislead the few Americans left who are concerned about constitutional government. In fact, the president’s untrammeled control of the CIA is probably the single most extraordinary power the imperial presidency possesses—totally beyond the balance of powers intended to protect the United States from the rise of a tyrant.

This situation is hardly new, although in late 2004, former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman declared that the Bush administration’s record in relation to the CIA represented “the worst intelligence scandal in the nation’s history.”³ Perhaps no comment caught the reality of the agency’s role better than James Schlesinger back in 1973. When the former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who had briefly succeeded Richard Helms as CIA director before becoming secretary of defense, arrived at the agency’s Virginia “campus,” he immediately announced: “I am here to see that you guys don’t screw Richard Nixon.”⁴ Schlesinger wanted to protect the Watergate-embattled president from revelations that the CIA, on Nixon’s orders, had tried to cover up the break-in of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee by his personal agents as well as the agency’s illegal infiltration of the anti-Vietnam War movement within the United States. (At the time, the CIA was prohibited from domestic spying operations.) Schlesinger underscored his point by noting that he would be reporting directly to White House chief of staff Bob Haldeman, not, as Helms had done, to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger.

In George W. Bush’s White House, Goss did not need to bother going directly to Karl Rove, Bush’s political “brain,” since the president’s outgoing and incoming national security advisers, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, spent the years 2001 to 2004 under Rove’s tutelage working to reelect the president.⁵ Moreover, in April 2005, Goss’s position as director of central intelligence changed. He became merely the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, not the director of Central Intelligence, which has now become the purview of the newly appointed director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, who presides over the fifteen separate federal intelligence agencies in a post-9/11 attempt to bring some coherence and coordination to them. As a result, Goss no longer briefed the president every morning on the CIA’s view of the world, and he attended National Security Council meetings only at Negroponte’s invitation. In May 2006, Bush fired Goss and replaced him with a four-star air force general, Michael Hayden, former director of the nation’s eavesdropping and cryptological intelligence unit, the National Security Agency. Scott Ritter, author of Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the U.N. and Overthrow Saddam Hussein, commented that “Goss’s tenure [as director of the CIA] will go down in history as one of the worst ever (followed closely by that of George Tenet).”⁶ Whether anything has actually changed other than some titles and bureaucrats is, however, an open question.

Whatever happens, the CIA will remain first and foremost the president’s private army, officially accountable to no other branch of the government. How this could be so, why the CIA was created, what it actually does, and the ways presidents since 1947 have twisted it to their own ends remains a widely misunderstood set of topics, crucial to the waning of American democracy. In fact, the term “intelligence” has always rested uneasily in the name “Central Intelligence Agency.” There is no question that the CIA was created in 1947 on the orders of President Truman for the sole purpose of acquiring, evaluating, and coordinating information collected both through espionage and from the public record, concerning the national security of the United States. Truman was determined to prevent another surprise attack on the United States like Pearl Harbor and to ensure that all information available to the government was compiled and presented to him in a timely and usable form.

The National Security Act of 1947 placed the CIA under the explicit direction of the National Security Council (NSC), the president’s chief staff unit—composed of appointed members not subject to congressional approval—focused on making decisions about war and peace. The CIA was given five functions, four of them dealing with the collection, coordination, and dissemination of intelligence. It was the fifth—a vaguely worded passage that allowed the CIA to “perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct”—that turned the CIA into the personal, secret, unaccountable army of the president. At least since 1953, when it secretly overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran, the CIA has often been ordered into battle without Congress having declared war, as the Constitution requires.

Clandestine or covert operations, although nowhere actually mentioned in the CIA’s enabling statutes, quickly became the agency’s main activity. As Loch K. Johnson, one of the CIA’s most impartial congressional analysts and former chief assistant to Senator Frank Church, chairman of the post-Watergate Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, observed, “The covert action shop had become a place for rapid promotion within the agency.”⁷ The Directorate of Operations (DO) soon absorbed two-thirds of the CIA’s budget and personnel, while the Directorate of Intelligence limped along, regularly producing bland documents known as National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs)—summaries of intelligence gathered by all the various intelligence agencies, including those in the Department of Defense. I personally read a good many of these when I served, from 1967 to 1973, as an outside consultant to what was then known as the CIA’s Office of National Estimates. This consulting function was abolished by Kissinger and Schlesinger during Nixon’s second term precisely because they did not want outsiders interfering with their ability to tell the president what to think.⁸

Meanwhile, CIA covert operations were mobilized in support of various criminal, dictatorial, or militarist organizations around the world so long as they were (or pretended to be) anticommunist. CIA operatives also planted false information in foreign newspapers and covertly fed large amounts of money to members of the Christian Democratic Party in Italy and the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, to King Hussein of Jordan, and to clients in Greece, West Germany, Egypt, Sudan, Suriname, Mauritius, the Philippines, Iran, Ecuador, and Chile. Clandestine agents devoted themselves to such tasks as depressing the global prices of agricultural products in order to damage uncooperative Third World countries, attempting to assassinate foreign leaders, and sponsoring guerrilla wars or insurgencies in places as diverse as the Ukraine, Poland, Albania, Hungary, Indonesia, China, Tibet, Oman, Malaysia, Iraq, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, North Korea, Bolivia, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Haiti, Guatemala, Cuba, Greece, Turkey, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua, to name only a few of those on the public record.⁹

All this was justified by the Cold War and no one beyond a very small group inside the executive branch was supposed to know anything about most of these activities, although over the years much information about them became public. The Central Intelligence Act of 1949 modified the National Security Act of 1947 with a series of revisions that, in the words of the pioneer scholar of the CIA Harry Howe Ransom, were meant “to permit [the CIA] a secrecy so absolute that accountability might be impossible.”¹⁰ No congressional oversight of the agency in any form existed until 1974, when, in the wake of Watergate, the Church Committee exposed the CIA’s illegal domestic surveillance, its assassinations of overseas leaders, and its lying to Congress. The committee’s report led Congress to create intelligence committees in both houses, but even that modest attempt at instituting oversight procedures has been thwarted by excessive secrecy—which the CIA has managed to impose on the work of Congress meant to bring a little sunlight to the agency. Since the mid-1970s, governmental secrecy has expanded exponentially, and Vice President Dick Cheney has made it his personal crusade to try to reverse the Church Committee’s reforms.¹¹

The irony is that Congress created the “central” intelligence agency in 1947 to concentrate vital information in one place and ensure that it went to the president and all other officials with a need-to-know. Instead the intelligence “community” has become a hotbed of competition, turf wars, and confusion. Failure to get intelligence into the right hands had clearly been one of the reasons for the catastrophic surprise of December 7, 1941, and—despite the multibillions that went into the CIA and other intelligence units and the spread of a culture of secrecy—it would be again on September 11, 2001. Overclassification and the use of secrecy to protect political and bureaucratic careers and departmental jurisdictions have rendered the entire intelligence apparatus unable to focus on much of anything.¹² To further enhance secrecy and add to the confusion, the president and the CIA have increasingly turned to completely “off-the-books” operations. The unsuccessful attempt to rig the Iraqi election of January 30, 2005, in favor of the White House’s preferred candidate, former CIA operative Iyad Allawi, by using “retired” agents, funds not appropriated by Congress, and other means is but one contemporary example of this phenomenon.¹³ The public learns about these operations, if it ever does, only as a result of leaks by insiders. The CIA belongs as much to the president as the Praetorian Guard once belonged to the Roman emperors.

Regardless of what it spends most of its time doing, the CIA is still tasked with providing accurate information to the president to enable him to avoid a surprise attack and protect the nation’s security. In the foyer of the CIA’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia, is inscribed a biblical quotation: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). Loch Johnson suggests that Allen Dulles, former director of the CIA under Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, probably thought it meant, “And ye shall know the truth—if ye be me, or the president.”¹⁴ Richard Helms, former DCI under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, once maintained to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward that the early-warning function of the CIA “is everything, and underline everything.”¹⁵ But the CIA’s mandate to provide such often unrequested (and sometimes unwelcome) information to a president constitutes a potential restraint on the president’s freedom of action. It may, as in the case of the Bush administration and warnings about 9/11, threaten to totally derail his policies, particularly since such intelligence is very rarely certain or unambiguous. If anything, over the years, the powers of the director of the CIA to compel a president to read and attend to an unwanted intelligence estimate have been systematically diluted.

When information supposedly supplied to the president about a possible attack or any other matter under the CIA’s purview is leaked to the public, both the agency and the intelligence in question tend to become politically radioactive. Such revelations have usually taken one of two forms. In the first instance, the president turns out to have been shielded from or refused to read or respond to accurate intelligence. In the second instance, the president secretly orders the suppression of the intelligence or has intelligence fabricated about a nonexistent danger to support his preferred policies. President Bush has engaged in both types of behavior, but he is certainly not the first president to do so.

In 1961, at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, Richard Bissell, then head of the Directorate of Operations, gained the ear of President John F. Kennedy and assured him that elated Cubans would welcome American-supported insurgents, strew rose petals in their path, and help U.S.-based Cuban exiles overthrow the Castro government. Bissell simply did not show Kennedy estimates, also in his possession, that indicated the depth of Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s popularity, suggesting that no popular uprising would occur and that the invasion would surely fail dismally.

Similarly, in May 1970, in the midst of the Vietnam War, as President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger plotted their “incursion” into Cambodia, the CIA’s Board of National Estimates (BNE) concluded that “an American invasion of Cambodia would fail to deter North Vietnamese continuation of the war.”¹⁶ DCI Helms did not even bother to deliver this estimate to the White House, knowing what the BNE did not—that the decision to invade had already been made and was unstoppable. Robert M. Gates, former DCI under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, puts it this way: “It has been my experience over the years that the usual response of a policymaker to intelligence with which he disagrees or which he finds unpalatable is to ignore it.”¹⁷

Examples of the outright distortion or fabrication of intelligence are rarer, but they have occurred. During the Vietnam War, General William Westmoreland, U.S. military commander from 1964 to 1968, omitted from his estimate of enemy forces all communist guerrillas and informal local defense forces—perhaps as many as 120,000–150,000 fighters— which another military estimate indicated had been responsible for up to 40 percent of American losses. His apparent intent was to make victory in Vietnam look more plausible. On March 14, 1967, DCI Helms included Westmoreland’s figures in an NIE going to the White House even though he “knew that the figures on enemy troop strength in Vietnam provided by military intelligence were wrong—or, at any rate, quite different from CIA figures. Yet he signed the estimate without dissent. The apparent reason, according to his biographer, was that ‘he did not want a fight with the military, supported by [National Security Adviser Walt] Rostow at the White House.’“¹⁸

Another example of the suppression or distortion of intelligence occurred in 1969-70 over the issue of whether or not the Soviet SS-9 ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) could carry three warheads and whether those warheads could be fired at separate and distinct targets— that is, whether or not the SS-9 carried MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles). If true, this would perhaps have given the Soviet Union a first-strike capability against the United States. The SS-9 came in four models, the first of which had its initial flight test on September 23, 1963, and began to be deployed in the summer of 1967. All Western intelligence agencies agreed that models one through three carried a single warhead, some with huge yields (in the range of eighteen megatons). Disagreement arose over model four, which seemed to carry three warheads that might—or might not—have been independently targetable.

National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird argued that the fourth version of the SS-9 was a MIRVed weapon; the CIA in its NIE on the subject claimed that it was not. At first the CIA rejected the pressure coming from the policy makers and, in fact, strengthened its evidence against MIRVs. Ultimately, however, DCI Helms removed the paragraph arguing against Soviet preparations for a first strike after “an assistant to [Secretary of Defense Laird] informed Helms that the statement contradicted the public position of the Secretary.”¹⁹ As it turned out, the CIA was right. The SS-9s were armed with MRVs (multiple reentry vehicles), not MIRVs—that is, they could produce only a cluster of explosions in a single area. The Soviet Union did not deploy MIRVs until 1976, six years after the United States had done so.²⁰ So it was we, not they, who accelerated the nuclear arms race—and we did so on the basis of fabricated intelligence.

When it comes to ignoring accurate CIA intelligence, the preeminent example in the Bush administration was National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice’s indifference to al-Qaeda—she also rejected warnings on the subject from officials of the departing Clinton administration—and her failure to ensure that the president read and understood the explicit warnings of an imminent surprise attack that the agency delivered to her. On August 6, 2001, in a blunt one-page analysis headlined, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” the CIA presented its President’s Daily Brief to Bush at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. According to Steve Coll of the Washington Post, “The report included the possibility that bin Laden operatives would seek to hijack airplanes. The hijacking threat, mentioned twice, was one of several possibilities outlined. There was no specific information about when or where such an attack might occur.”²¹

After the extent of its failure became known, and under extreme pressure from the public and families of the victims of 9/11, the Bush administration reluctantly authorized the creation of a National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (also known as the 9/11 Commission) and permitted National Security Adviser Rice to testify before it in public. But the fix was in: the commission was constrained to concentrate on “intelligence failures” instead of the failure of policy makers to heed the intelligence that came their way, and on the need to “reform” the CIA—but not to such an extent as to damage the president’s ability to blame it for his mistakes and use it in future operations of his choice.

After the 9/11 attacks and the Bush administration’s decision to go to war with Iraq, the focus shifted from ignoring unwanted intelligence to actively creating false intelligence that would support its regime-change war of choice. The critical item in the administration’s rush to war was the NIE of October 1, 2002, entitled “Iraq’s Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction,” which became known inside the agency as the “whore of Babylon.”²² It explicitly endorsed Vice President Cheney’s contention of August 26, 2002—”We know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons”—and was signed by DCI George Tenet with “high confidence.” “The intelligence process,” wrote CIA veteran analyst Ray McGovern, “was not the only thing undermined. So was the Constitution. Various drafts of the NIE, reinforced with heavy doses of ‘mushroom-cloud’ rhetoric, were used to deceive congressmen and senators into ceding to the executive their prerogative to declare war—the all-important prerogative that the framers of the Constitution took great care to reserve exclusively to our elected representatives in Congress.”

In succeeding months, numerous review commissions revealed that the October NIE was only one of numerous failures by the government’s supposed truth tellers to do what the people of the United States pay them to do. The Senate Intelligence Committee, the 9/11 Commission, and the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group, under Charles Duelfer, all reported that the CIA’s intelligence on Iraqi WMD was largely fictitious. Even more dangerous for the White House, these reports suggested that much of this intelligence had been manufactured by neoconservative officials in the Pentagon long eager to invade Iraq.

In particular, the third-highest-ranking civilian defense official in the Pentagon, Douglas Feith, had set up the Office of Special Plans, devoted to going through all the raw intelligence available to the various spy agencies and ferreting out items that offered possible evidence of (or hints of evidence of) links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

It was this effort to get around both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, neither of whose analysts had found any links or ties between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, that eventually led some officials to break ranks and charge publicly that the war against Iraq was in fact undercutting the “war on terrorism.” The most prominent of these whistle-blowers were Richard A. Clarke, the White House’s coordinator for counterterrorism in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, who published a tell-all book, Against All Enemies, and the CIA’s Michael Scheuer, who, in his book Imperial Hubris and in a letter to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees entitled “How Not to Catch a Terrorist,” charged: “In the CIA’s core, U.S.-based Bin Laden operational unit today there are fewer Directorate of Operations officers with substantive expertise on al-Qaeda than there were on 11 September 2001.”²³

But there were others. In July 2003, after over twenty years of service, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski resigned her air force commission and left the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia department to reveal how Feith’s Iraq-war-planning unit had manufactured scare stories about Iraq’s weapons and its ties to terrorists.²⁴ Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, with experience in several African countries and on the National Security Council, was asked by the CIA to go to the Saharan nation of Niger to investigate allegations that it had secretly sold uranium to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, charges that President Bush had endorsed with his famous “sixteen words” in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address. When the Bush administration continued to retail intelligence on the subject of Niger “yellowcake” that it knew to be forged and false, Wilson went public with an op-ed in the New York Times in which, among other things, he wrote, “Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”²⁵ In retaliation, top administration officials conspired to “out” his wife, an undercover CIA agent working on nuclear proliferation and weapons of mass destruction. This was clearly meant to be a warning to any other officials or former officials who might care to leak or come forward with information damaging to the administration.

Gary C. Schroen, CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1996 to 1999, has provided secret details about the way the agency paid off Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance warlords in the autumn of 2001 to reopen the civil war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and on the bungling of U.S. Special Forces in the subsequent campaign.²⁶ Melissa Boyle Mahle, a former CIA clandestine services officer fluent in Arabic, denounced former director George Tenet for his “total denial of failure” after September 11, 2001.²⁷ Although not an American whistle-blower, the late British foreign secretary Robin Cook also deserves mention as the only cabinet-rank statesman in any country to resign over the war in Iraq—he stepped down as leader of the House of Commons in 2003 to protest the invasion—and then to denounce official lies that were being told about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. “Instead of using intelligence as evidence on which to base a decision about policy,” he charged, “we used intelligence as the basis on which to justify a policy on which we had already settled.”²⁸

After George Tenet resigned as George Bush’s DCI in July 2004 and went on the lecture circuit at $35,000 an appearance—he had earned well over a half million dollars by November 2004—Bush appointed Porter Goss to stanch the leaks at Langley.²⁹ The Senate confirmed him by a vote of 77 to 17 (six senators did not vote), suggesting the increasing worthlessness of Senate oversight of the executive branch. The new head of the CIA quickly got rid of as many messengers like Scheuer as he could identify. Goss had clearly been ordered to make it appear that the agency misled the president (rather than the other way around, as was actually the case). He was then supposed to shake up what he called a “dysfunctional” organization.

Before representing the Fourteenth District of Florida in the House for some sixteen years, Goss worked in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (DO). During that time he was stationed primarily in Latin America, and rumors persist that he left the agency under a cloud. In 1995, he was appointed to the House Intelligence Committee and, in 1997, the ex-agent became its chairman. There is no evidence that he ever did anything useful in this position, like investigating the intelligence lapses that preceded 9/11 or the failure of the CIA to place a single spy anywhere in Saddam Hussein’s regime. During the 2004 election campaign he actually gave speeches attacking candidate John Kerry for “slashing intelligence funding” without mentioning that, in 1995, he himself had cosponsored a measure calling for the firing of 20 percent of all CIA personnel over five years.

Goss brought with him to the agency a group of Republican activist staff members from the House Intelligence Committee and set them up in prominent executive positions. They helped unleash a witch hunt against any and all intelligence officers who sought to put accuracy and integrity ahead of service to George W. Bush. Goss began his shake-up of the CIA by forcing out the director and deputy director of operations, even though this is not the primary place where the failures of the CIA in recent years have occurred. (This, in turn, led to speculation that it was a way to keep his own service record in the DO under wraps.) Shortly thereafter, Goss fired Jami A. Miscik, deputy director for intelligence, who had worked in the agency since 1983 and was a close associate of George Tenet. She had led the Directorate of Intelligence since May 2002, a period in which much of the false reporting on Iraq occurred. It might have seemed logical that Miscik would be held responsible for the politicized intelligence produced on her watch; but under the circumstances it seems clear that she was actually a scapegoat for President Bush and Vice President Cheney, who ordered up the false intelligence in the first place.³⁰ As Spencer Ackerman of the New Republic has written, “If Goss thought the CIA was dysfunctional before, he has guaranteed that it is now.”³¹

At the same time, President Bush ordered that the number of clandestine service officers within the agency be doubled, placing a much greater emphasis on covert operations.³² The CIA remains the main executive-branch department in charge of overthrowing foreign governments, promoting regimes of state terrorism, kidnapping people of interest to the administration and sending them to friendly foreign countries to be tortured and/or killed, assassination and the torture of prisoners in violation of international and domestic law, and numerous other “wet” exercises that both the president and the country in which they are executed want to be able to deny.

CIA covert operations are distinguished from military assaults carried out by the Department of Defense (which is also rapidly expanding its covert operations) chiefly by the requirement that the president must be able plausibly to deny that he ordered them or that he even knew about them. Covert operations are therefore protected by the most rigorous secrecy. As Loch Johnson observes, this sort of secrecy also destroys the last shreds of agency accountability. “Under a system of plausible denial it often becomes uncertain who really does know about, and has approved of, any given covert action. The lines of accountability wash away like markings in the sand.”³³

From the creation of the CIA in 1947 down to the Hughes-Ryan Act of 1974 (formally entitled Section 602(a) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974), there were virtually no officials of government who actually supervised or gave approval for covert acts or knew in detail about them or what they were supposed to accomplish. “The foreign policy establishment in Washington trusted the CIA,” Thomas Powers wrote in 1979, “and still trusts it, for that matter, but beyond governing circles the political foundation of the CIA rested on nothing more substantial than a popular fascination with espionage and a conviction that we are the good guys.”³⁴ The Church Committee estimated that the National Security Council itself knew about and approved of no more than about 14 percent of all covert actions from 1961 to 1975.³⁵

For example, when it came to investigating the CIAs several attempts to assassinate President Fidel Castro of Cuba (and a few other heads of state), the Church Committee had to throw in the towel. Numerous cabinet officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, testified under oath that it was unthinkable that either Presidents Eisenhower or Kennedy had authorized such a mission. As Powers writes, “The committee was forced to confess in the end that while it had no evidence that the CIA had been a rogue elephant rampaging out of control, it also had no evidence that Eisenhower or Kennedy or anyone speaking in one of their names had ordered the CIA to kill Castro. The only indisputable fact was that the CIA did, in fact, try to do so.”³⁶ Plausible denial, extreme secrecy, the power of the presidency, and a culture of loyalty to the agency rather than to the Constitution cause this kind of endemic confusion—exceedingly useful to those in power—about who is responsible for what the CIA does, a problem that still haunts the government today.

The 1974 Hughes-Ryan Act, named after its authors, Senator Harold E. Hughes (Democrat from Iowa) and Representative Leo J. Ryan (Democrat from California), for the first time tried to enforce the CIAs accountability to the elected representatives of the people. It states that “No funds ... may be expended by or on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency for operations in foreign countries ... unless and until the President finds that each such operation is important to the national security of the United States.” The verb “finds” is the origin of the odd term “finding,” which is governmental argot for the document that the president now signs approving and setting into motion a covert operation. The law also stipulates that the president must give the appropriate committees of Congress “in a timely fashion” a description of each operation and its scope.

This law has not worked well. In the middle of the Reagan administration, members of Congress first read in the newspapers that, on orders of the president’s national security adviser, Vice Admiral John M. Poindexter, CIA operatives were covertly and illegally selling arms to the revolutionary government of Iran and using the funds thus obtained to finance a congressionally forbidden insurgency against the elected government of Nicaragua. This disaster led to much stronger demands for intelligence oversight, but the president and his secret army found numerous ways to get around such pressures. For example, in lieu of a specific finding, “worldwide findings” have given the CIA blanket authority to conduct certain types of unspecified covert operations—say, those against terrorists. Operations have also been “privatized” by getting foreign governments and U.S. corporations to pay for them, or kept totally hidden via “off the books” personnel and funds. To illustrate what the CIA does best, let us look briefly at its record in Chile, in Afghanistan, and in carrying out so-called extraordinary renditions.

CIA activities in Chile, ranging from the early 1960s to 1990, occurred in both the pre- and postaccountability eras. Before 1974, they were intended to overthrow the oldest and most stable democracy in Latin America, dating from the country’s independence in 1818, and replace it with “the vilest of Latin American dictators in recent history.”³⁷ Having to report to Congress had little effect on CIA operations in Chile. If findings were ever signed and passed to Capitol Hill, we have no record of them. What we do have is a vast archive of thousands of highly classified reports and cables from the Oval Office, the CIA, the National Security Council, the State Department, the American embassy in Santiago, and the FBI that the U.S. government was forced to declassify because of the blowback that the operations themselves generated, including lawsuits by Chilean torture victims and demands for the arrest and trial of former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.³⁸

Chile was certainly not the first instance in which the United States government used its clandestine services to manipulate, undermine, or overthrow a fellow democracy. It had done so in many other places, including Italy in 1947-48, Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia in 1957-58, Brazil from 1961 to 1964, Greece from 1964 to 1974, South Korea from 1961 to 1987, and the Philippines in every year since it gained its independence from the United States in 1946. But Chile provides us with the first written record of a U.S. president ordering the overthrow of a democratically elected government—namely, the handwritten notes of CIA director Richard Helms reflecting the orders given to him by President Richard Nixon in the White House on September 15, 1970.³⁹ Even the heavily censored CIA documents released to the Church Committee in 1975 led Senator Church to produce his own definition of “covert action.” It is a “semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies, and consorting with known torturers and international terrorists.”⁴⁰

From the moment the Kennedy administration came to power in 1961 until the overthrow and death of Chile’s president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, the CIA spent some $12 million on a massive “black” propaganda campaign to support Allende’s primary political opponent, Eduardo Frei, the candidate of the Christian Democratic Party, and to denigrate Allende as a stooge of the Soviet Union. In addition, the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (which owned the Chilean telephone system) and other American-owned businesses in Chile gave the CIA an extra $1.5 million to help discredit Allende. ITT properties in Chile, including two Sheraton Hotels, were worth at least $153 million. In July 1970, two months before Allende was elected president, John McCone, director of central intelligence from 1961 to 1965 and in 1970 a member of the board of directors of ITT, set up an appointment with then DCI Richard Helms. He offered money and cooperation from ITT “for the purpose of assisting any [U.S.] government plan ... to stop Allende.” ITT presented a plan “aimed at inducing economic collapse” in Chile.⁴¹

In the 1964 election, the CIA directly underwrote more than half of Frei’s campaign expenses. It spent more than $2.6 million in support of the election of the Christian Democratic candidate. More sinister was the agency’s disinformation campaign, which it later held up as a model of how to do it. The Church Committee reported, “Extensive use was made of the press, radio, films, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, direct mailings, paper streamers, and wall painting. It was a ‘scare campaign,’ which relied heavily on images of Soviet tanks and Cuban firing squads and was directed especially to women.”⁴² The CIA placed radio spots that featured the sound of a machine gun, followed by a woman’s cry: “They have killed my child—the communists.” One poster, printed in the thousands, showed children with a hammer and sickle stamped on their foreheads. Juanita Castro, Fidel’s anticommunist sister, said on the radio, “If the Reds win in Chile, no type of religious activity will be possible.... Chilean mothers, I know you will not allow your children to be taken from you and sent to the Communist bloc, as in the case of Cuba.”⁴³

The CIA boasted that it produced and planted in various media around the world some 726 stories against an Allende presidency. Most of these appeared first in Latin American newspapers and were later reprinted in Chilean ones; some appeared in the CIA’s own secret outlets, which included Der Monat in Germany, Encounter in Britain, the Daily American of Rome, and the South Pacific Mail of Santiago. Some seeped into the New York Times and the Washington Post, including the idea that Allende was a paid agent of the USSR.⁴⁴ In 1964, these “dirty tricks” produced the desired results. Frei received 56 percent of the vote to Allende’s 39 percent, an unprecedented and almost statistically impossible outcome, given Chile’s multiparty electoral system. The targeted scare tactics worked well. While Chilean men voted for Allende by a plurality of more than 67,000, women gave Frei 469,000 more votes than Allende.⁴⁵ As a reward and an insurance policy, the U.S. government promptly began to pay off Frei. Under the U.S.’s Alliance for Progress, a scheme to prevent the spread of leftist views in Latin America, “Chile received more American aid per capita than just about any other country in the world—Vietnam excepted.”⁴⁶

The next presidential election was scheduled for September 4, 1970. Even though the CIA kept up its blistering disinformation campaign, Chilean voters had become warier of the increasingly preposterous American propaganda and its “false flag” agents who tried to convince Chilean business and military elites that “an Allende victory means violence and Stalinist repression.” As a matter of fact, there was no issue of potential Soviet influence in Chile. Allende was not a communist and, in any case, after he came to power in 1970 the Soviet Union wisely urged him to “put his relations with the United States in order.”⁴⁷ In August 1970, Henry Kissinger had ordered a special national intelligence estimate to answer the question “What would happen in the event of an Allende victory?” It concluded: “An Allende election carried no military, strategic, or regional threat to U.S. interests in security and stability.”⁴⁸

In the September 4 election, Allende finally won a plurality, but not a majority, of the vote. However, he confidently expected that on October 24 the Chilean Congress would choose him to be president—normal parliamentary practice.

In an attempt to prevent this, the Nixon White House and the CIA sprang into action. On October 16, 1970, CIA headquarters dispatched a secret “eyes only” cable to Henry Hecksher, the CIA Santiago station chief. The actual sender, presumably DCI Helms, is blacked out in the text. “It is firm and continuous policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October, but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date. We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [United States government] and American hand be well hidden.”⁴⁹

For months, the CIA had been sounding out senior Chilean military officers on the issue of a coup, promising extensive help to any who agreed to participate. The agency’s operatives soon discovered that the main obstacle was the commander in chief of the army, General Rene Schneider, who represented what the CIA called “the apolitical, constitution-oriented inertia of the Chilean military.”⁵⁰ Therefore, the CIA set out to find and arm dissident Chilean forces who would assassinate him. One group it approached asked for submachine guns, ammunition, and $50,000 to do the job, and the agency obliged, shipping the weapons from Washington to Santiago in the regular diplomatic pouch.⁵¹ Local CIA agents then delivered them to the plotters at 2 a.m. on October 22, 1970; at 8 a.m. the assassins surrounded General Schneider’s chauffeur-driven car, knocked out the rear window, and fatally wounded him. He died in a hospital three days later.

The CIA went to great lengths to cover its tracks, including paying hush money to the conspirators and driving to a general’s home to retrieve the guns they had given him. Colonel Paul Wimert, the military attaché in the U.S. embassy in Santiago, had to pistol-whip the general to force him to comply.⁵² The agency then dumped the machine guns in the ocean to ensure that they could not be traced back to the U.S. government.

But Washington and the CIA had overplayed their hands. “Far from fostering a coup climate,” Peter Kornbluh, the chief Chilean specialist at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., writes, “the Schneider shooting produced an overwhelming public and political repudiation of violence and a clear reaffirmation of Chile’s civil, constitutional tradition.”⁵³ The Chilean Congress voted 153 to 57 to ratify Allende as president, with all seventy-four senators and congressmen from the Christian Democratic Party voting with Allende’s own party. This result did not, however, even begin to slow down Washington’s venomous campaign. For the next three years, the Nixon administration tried in every way to undermine Allende by producing economic chaos in Chile, and the CIA worked tirelessly to find a suitable general to put in power. They finally identified a likely candidate in the summer of 1971—the cruel, ruthless, and corrupt General Augusto Pinochet.

The Chilean military under Pinochet finally moved against Allende on “the other 9/11”—September 11, 1973. During the attack on La Moneda, the presidential palace, Pinochet’s forces offered Allende an airplane to fly him and his family into exile. (Pinochet was taped giving radio instructions to his troops, in which he says, “That plane will never land.”⁵⁴) Allende apparently took his own life rather than agreeing to any offer or allowing himself to be captured. He was found dead of gunshot wounds in his office around 2 p.m. on September 11.

Thus began Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship and reign of terror—sponsored and paid for by the U.S. government. During this period, the Chilean military was responsible for the murder, disappearance, or death by torture of some 3,197 citizens, according to the postdictatorship Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, released in 1991. In November 2004, the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture, chaired by Monsignor Sergio Valech, published a twelve-hundred-page report that documented more than 27,000 confirmed cases of political imprisonment and “the most grotesque forms of torture.”⁵⁵

Pinochet’s major instrument of oppression was the army’s Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), headed by Colonel Manuel Contreras. In addition to carrying out fierce repression within Chile, Contreras was the creator of Operation Condor, which a top-secret CIA report describes laconically as “a cooperative effort by the intelligence/security services of several South American countries to combat terrorism and subversion.”⁵⁶ It was, in fact, a conspiracy among the intelligence services of Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia, subsequently joined by Brazil, and backed by the Nixon administration, to hunt down and assassinate leftists within these countries and, in particular, those living abroad in exile. Kornbluh describes Condor as “the most sinister state-sponsored terrorist network in the Western hemisphere, if not in the world.”⁵⁷ John Dinges, a Columbia University professor and author of The Condor Years, estimates that Condor agents killed at least 13,000 people in the six participating countries.⁵⁸

Among its trademark atrocities were the car-bomb killings of the exiled general Carlos Prats and his wife—Prats had been General Schneider’s successor—in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974, and of Orlando Letelier, Allende’s ambassador to Washington and later foreign minister, and his twenty-six-year-old American colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, on a street in Washington, D.C., on September 21, 1976. Both assassinations were carried out by the most famous member of DINA’s foreign branch, Michael Vernon Townley, an American born in Waterloo, Iowa. The killing of Letelier and an American citizen in the nation’s capital was one of the most flagrant acts of international terrorism carried out in the United States prior to September 11, 2001. It set off a furious FBI investigation that ultimately led Chile to turn over Townley, who confessed to his role in the crime. During this period, the CIA was notoriously passive, lacking all signs of interest in the Letelier case—even though on August 25, 1975, the agency had hosted a luncheon for Colonel Contreras in Washington and that same year put him on its payroll, making a personal payment to him of $5,000.⁵⁹ The CIA has, to date, never been directly connected to the Letelier murder, but many of the most critical documents about the case remain secret and many questions remain about the full scope of the agency’s role in Chilean politics.

In reaction to the Letelier case, the Carter administration imposed sanctions on Chile, but these were quickly lifted when Ronald Reagan came to power. Pinochet’s regime was a particular favorite of both Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. The end of the military dictatorship came only when the passive resistance of the people of Chile forced Pinochet to hold a plebiscite. On October 5, 1988, with 98 percent of eligible Chileans turning out, 54.7 percent voted to end the dictatorship. Pinochet left office and electoral politics were hesitantly restored, but the military thoroughly protected itself through various amnesty laws and other measures.

Pinochet was ultimately discredited by two events. On October 16, 1998, while he was visiting London for medical treatments, a British judge signed a warrant for his arrest after a Spanish judge sought his extradition to face trial for the torture of Spanish citizens in Chile. Held under house arrest near London for 503 days, he was finally returned to Chile, where the international controversy over the arrest of a former head of state for human rights violations made it increasingly impossible for the Chilean courts to continue to honor the immunity he had essentially granted himself.⁶⁰ Public opinion in Chile finally turned decisively against him when a U.S. Senate committee, investigating money laundering by the Riggs Bank of Washington, D.C., revealed that between 1974 and 1997 various countries around the world had paid Pinochet some $12.3 million. In 1976, the U.S. government alone contributed some $3 million. Pinochet and his wife had siphoned off between $4 million and $8 million of these funds and hired the Riggs Bank to hide the money for them in secret, frequently moved accounts. On December 24, 2004, a Chilean special investigation into Pinochet’s wealth determined that between 1985 and 2002, he had actually hidden $16 million—twice the previously reported amount—at Riggs. The revelation that, with so much money stashed away, he was still receiving a monthly pension of $2,000 utterly destroyed his claim that he had done everything “for the good of Chile.”⁶¹

As in Chile, so in Afghanistan, the CIA record was filled with payoffs, murders, corrupt public officials in Washington, and support for local villains. The Afghan operation, according to several CIA partisans, was “the biggest, meanest, and far and away most successful CIA campaign in history.”⁶² That was the short-term view. As a matter of fact, the CIA’s covert operations in Afghanistan from 1979 to the victory of the Taliban in 1996 produced the worst instance of blowback among all of America’s secret wars—namely, al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Neither the United States nor the world can stand many more “victories” of that sort.

The Carter administration deliberately provoked the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which occurred on Christmas Eve 1979. In his 1996 memoir, former CIA director Robert Gates acknowledges that the American intelligence services began to aid the anti-Soviet mujahideen guerrillas not after the Russian invasion but six months before it.⁶³ On July 3, 1979, President Carter signed a finding authorizing secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime then ruling in Kabul. His purpose—and that of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski—was to provoke a full-scale Soviet military intervention. Carter wanted to tie down the USSR and so prevent its leaders from exploiting the 1979 anti-American revolution in Iran. In addition, as Brzezinski put it, “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”⁶⁴

Before it was over, the CIA and the USSR between them turned Afghanistan, which had been a functioning state with a healthy middle class, into a warring collection of tribes, Islamic sects, and heroin-producing warlords. In human terms, the effort cost 1.8 million Afghan casualties and sent 2.6 million fleeing as refugees, while ten million unexploded land mines were left strewn around the country. It also took the lives of about 15,000 Soviet soldiers and contributed to the dissolution of the USSR.

The destruction of Afghanistan actually began in 1973. In that year, General Sardar Mohammed Daoud, the cousin and brother-in-law of King Zahir Shah, overthrew the king, declared Afghanistan a republic, and instituted a program of modernization. Zahir Shah went into exile in Rome. These developments made possible the rise of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, a pro-Soviet communist party, which, in early 1978, with extensive help from the USSR, overthrew then president Daoud.

The communists’ policies of secularization in turn provoked a violent response from devout Islamists. The anticommunist revolt that began in western Afghanistan in March 1979 was initially a response to a government initiative to teach girls to read, something that devout Sunnis opposed. A triumvirate of anticommunist nations—the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia—came to the aid of the rebels. Each had diverse, even contradictory motives for doing so, but the United States did not take these differences seriously until it was too late. By the time the Americans woke up, at the end of the 1990s, the radical Islamist Taliban had established a fundamentalist government of the most extreme sort in Kabul. Recognized only by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, it granted Osama bin Laden freedom of action and offered him protection from American efforts to capture or kill him.

During the 1980s, the Cold War shaped the perspectives of the Reagan White House and of the CIA. Both wanted to see as many Soviet soldiers as possible killed, the “Evil Empire” drained, and an aura of rugged machismo as well as credibility restored to the United States that they feared had been lost when the Shah of Iran was overthrown. As it turned out, other than pinning down Soviet troops beyond the borders of the USSR, the CIA had no coherent strategy for its Afghan war and seemed almost entirely innocent of the history, culture, religion, and aspirations of the country or its own allies. Howard Hart, the CIA representative in the Pakistani capital, said that the agency told him, in effect, “You’re a young man; here’s your bag of money, go raise hell. Don’t fuck it up, just go out there and kill Soviets.”⁶⁵

Hart’s marching orders came from a most peculiar American, one of the few CIA directors who was genuinely close to his president. Educated by Jesuits, William Casey, Reagan’s DCI from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta. The Washington Post’s Steve Coll in his book Ghost Wars describes Casey’s religiosity this way: “Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, ‘Maryknoll,’ on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on anyone who asked his advice. Once settled at the CIA, he began to funnel covert action funds through the Catholic Church to anticommunists in Poland and Central America, sometimes in violation of American law. He believed fervently that by increasing the Catholic Church’s reach and power he could contain communism’s advance, or reverse it.”⁶⁶ From Casey’s convictions grew the most important U.S. foreign policies of the 1980s—support for a clandestine anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan and sponsorship of an Operation Condor-like campaign of state terrorism in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

Casey knew next to nothing about Islam or the grievances of Middle Eastern nations against Western imperialism. He saw political Islam and the Catholic Church as natural allies in covert actions against Soviet imperialism. He believed that the USSR was trying to strike at the United States in Central America and in the oil-producing states of the Middle East. He supported Islam as an answer to the Soviet Union’s atheism and he sometimes even confused lay Catholic organizations such as the right-wing Opus Dei with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian extremist organization in which Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant, became a passionate member. The Muslim Brotherhood’s branch in Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami, was strongly backed by the Pakistani army, and Casey, more than any other American, was responsible for creating an alliance of the CIA, Saudi intelligence, and the intelligence forces of General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s military dictator from 1977 to 1988. On the suggestion of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) organization, Casey went so far as to print thousands of copies of the Koran, which he shipped to the Afghan frontier for distribution in Afghanistan and Soviet Uzbekistan. Without presidential authority, he also fomented Muslim attacks inside the USSR and always maintained that the CIA’s clandestine officers were too timid. He preferred the type represented by his friend Oliver North, the marine lieutenant colonel at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal, who, as a top Reagan administration official, organized the clandestine selling of weapons to Iran (for use against Iraq) in order to generate funds for the Nicaraguan Contra rebel group in violation of U.S. law.⁶⁷

Over time, Casey’s position hardened into CIA dogma that its agents, protected by secrecy from ever having their ignorance exposed, enforced in every way they could. The agency resolutely refused to help choose winners and losers among the Afghan jihad’s guerrilla leaders. The result was that, as Coll puts it, “Zia-ul-Haq’s political and religious agenda in Afghanistan gradually became the CIA’s own.”⁶⁸ In the era after Casey, some scholars, journalists, and members of Congress questioned the agency’s lavish support of the murderous Pakistan-backed Islamist Afghan general Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, especially after he refused to shake hands with Ronald Reagan because he was an “infidel.” But Milton Bear-den, the Islamabad station chief from 1986 to 1989, and Frank Anderson, chief of the Afghan task force at Langley, vehemently defended Hekmatyar on the grounds that “he fielded the most effective anti-Soviet fighters.”⁶⁹

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan was the roles played in them by two wholly out-of-control Americans, one a member of the Appropriations Committee of Congress and the other an exceptionally ruthless CIA clandestine services officer who, once he had teamed up with the congressman, operated more or less independent of any agency supervision. Nothing more readily illustrates the dangers of secrecy in the United States government than the ways an ignoramus of a congressman and a high-ranking CIA thug managed to hijack American foreign policy. Under the covert guidance of Representative Charlie Wilson and CIA operative Gust Avrakotos, the agency flooded Afghanistan with an incredible array of extremely dangerous weapons and “unapologetically mov[ed] to equip and train cadres of high tech holy warriors in the art of waging a war of urban terror against a modern superpower”—initially, the USSR.⁷⁰

From 1973 to 1996, Charlie Wilson represented the Second District of Texas in the House of Representatives. He had graduated from the Naval Academy in 1956, eighth from the bottom of his class and with more demerits than any other cadet in Annapolis’s history. After serving in the Texas state legislature, he arrived in Washington in 1973 and quickly became known as “Good Time Charlie, the biggest playboy in Congress.”

He hired only good-looking women for his staff because, as he told visitors in his booming voice, “You can teach ‘em to type but you can’t teach ‘em to grow tits,” and was known for escorting “a parade of beauty queens ... to White House parties.”⁷¹ His biographer describes him as “a seemingly corrupt, cocaine snorting, scandal prone womanizer who the CIA was convinced could only get the agency into terrible trouble if it permitted him to become involved in any way in its operations.”⁷² Nonetheless, he managed to do so thanks to lax congressional oversight and corruption.

Wilson’s partner in influencing CIA policy toward Afghanistan was Gust Avrakotos, the son of working-class Greek immigrants from the steel workers’ town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. Only in 1960 had the CIA begun to recruit officers for the Directorate of Operations from among what it called “new Americans,” meaning ethnics, such as Chinese-, Japanese-, Hispanic-, and Greek-Americans. Up until then, it had followed the British model, taking only Ivy League sons of the Eastern establishment. Avrakotos joined the CIA in 1961 and came to nurture a hatred for the blue bloods, or “cake eaters,” as he called them, who looked down on him. After spook school at Camp Peary, next door to Jamestown, Virginia, he was posted to Athens because he was fluent in Greek, and he remained there right through the CIA-sponsored reign of terror of the Greek colonels. He left the country in 1978 but could not get another decent assignment—he tried for Helsinki—because the head of the European Division regarded him as too uncouth to send to any European capital. He sat around Langley for a long period without any work until he was recruited by John McGaffin, head of the Afghan program. “If it’s really true that you have nothing to do,” McGaffin said, “why not come upstairs? We’re killing Russians.”⁷³

If Charlie Wilson was the moneybags and spark plug of this pair, Avrakotos was the street fighter who relished arming the tribesmen in Afghanistan with Kalashnikovs and Stinger surface-to-air shoulder-fired missiles. In 1976, Wilson became a member of the House Appropriations Committee at a time when its chairman used to have a sign mounted over his desk: “Them that has the gold make the rules.” Wilson acted on this principle and advanced rapidly on this most powerful of all congressional committees. He was first appointed to the Foreign Operations Subcommittee, which doles out foreign aid. He then did a big favor for Speaker Tip O’Neill and, in return, O’Neill assigned Wilson to the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.

Wilson soon discovered that all of the CIA’s budget and 40 percent of the Pentagon’s budget is “black”—that is, totally hidden from the public and all but a privileged few congressmen. As a member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, he could add virtually any amount of money to whatever black project he supported. In short, he had stumbled upon the world of “earmarks,” a euphemism that refers to the power of members of Congress to insert into appropriations bills funds for special projects that the executive branch has not asked for and that are often not in the nation’s best interest.

The practice of earmarking continues in widespread use at the present time. In 1998, the 2,000 earmarks slipped into all thirteen appropriations bills had an overall value of $10.6 billion. By 2004, the numbers had grown to 15,584 earmarks worth $32.7 billion. In a 2005 interview, Wilson, by then a lobbyist for Pakistan, said, “We would never have won the [anti-Soviet Afghan] war if it hadn’t been for earmarking because the [CIA] would have never spent the money the way we wanted it to.”⁷⁴ So long as Wilson did favors for other members on the subcommittee by supporting defense projects in their districts, they never objected to his private obsessions. In 1986, Wilson was finally able to join the House’s Intelligence Committee, which only added to his ability to earmark, doubling and tripling the secret funds he could direct to Afghan operations.

Like several influential Americans with right-wing political orientations, Wilson came under the influence of the charismatic head of Pakistan’s army, General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq. In July 1977, Zia had seized power, declared martial law, and in 1979 hanged the president who had promoted him, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. In retaliation, President Jimmy Carter cut off all U.S. aid to Pakistan. However, in 1980, Congressman Wilson visited Pakistan at the urging of a conservative lady friend from Houston and came under the spell of the general. He also learned for the first time about the heroic anticommunist mujahideen who were fighting against the Soviet Union across the border in Afghanistan, and became a convert to their cause. Using earmarked funds, he restored Zia’s aid money and added several million dollars to the CIA’s efforts to arm the Afghan guerrillas, each dollar of which the Saudi government secretly matched. Pakistan provided the fighters with sanctuary, training, arms, and even sent its own officers into Afghanistan as advisers on military operations. Saudi Arabia served as the fighters’ banker, providing hundreds of millions with no strings attached. Several governments, including Egypt, China, and Israel, secretly supplied arms.

However, Pakistan’s motives in Afghanistan were very different from those of the United States. Zia was a devout Muslim and a passionate supporter of Islamist groups in his own country, Afghanistan, and throughout the world, but he was not a fanatic and had some quite practical reasons for supporting Afghanistan’s jihadists.

Zia feared above all that Pakistan would be squeezed between a Soviet-dominated Afghanistan and a hostile India. He also had to guard against an independence movement among the Pashtuns, the largest tribal group in Afghanistan and one of the largest in Pakistan, that, if successful, might cause the breakup of Pakistan. In other words, while he backed the Islamic militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan on religious grounds, he was quite prepared to use them strategically. From the beginning, Zia demanded that all weapons and aid for the Afghans from whatever source first pass through the hands of Pakistan’s military intelligence, the ISI. The CIA was delighted to agree. In doing so, the agency helped lay the foundation not just for the decimation of Afghanistan and the rise of the Taliban but for Pakistan’s anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir in the 1990s.

Congressman Wilson’s greatest preoccupation in cooperating with Zia was to supply the Afghans with weaponry that would be effective against the Soviets’ most feared weapon—the Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunship. The Red Army used it to slaughter innumerable mujahideen as well as— in Vietnam War fashion—to shoot up Afghan villages. Wilson actually favored giving the Afghans the Oerlikon antiaircraft gun made in Switzerland. (It was later charged that he was on the take from the Zurich-based manufacturer of the weapon.)⁷⁵ His CIA sidekick Avrakotos considered it too heavy for guerrillas to move easily but could not openly stand in Wilson’s way. After months of controversy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff finally dropped their objections to supplying the Afghans with the far lighter American-made Stinger shoulder-fired missile, which had never before been used in combat. It proved to be murderous against the relatively slow-moving Hinds, and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev decided to cut his losses by getting out altogether. In Wilson’s post-Soviet-withdrawal tour of Afghanistan, mujahideen fighters triumphantly fired their Stingers just for his benefit. They also presented him with a souvenir—part of the launcher of the first Stinger to bring down a Hind gunship—which he still proudly displays today in his Washington office.

Zia died in a mysterious plane crash on August 17, 1988, four months after a set of Geneva Accords ratified the formal terms of Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. As the Soviet troops departed, the warlord Hekmatyar embarked on a clandestine plan to eliminate his rivals and establish his Islamic party, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, as the most powerful national force in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, followed by the implosion of the USSR in 1991, the United States lost virtually all interest in Afghanistan. The pro-Soviet government in Kabul did not fall immediately. Hekmatyar was never ultimately as good as the CIA imagined him to be. His only real accomplishment was to plunge the country into a murderous civil war. In 1994, both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia transferred their secret support to the newly created Taliban, who proved to be the most militarily effective of the warring groups. On September 26, 1996, the Taliban conquered Kabul, now practically a city of rubble. The next day they killed the formerly Soviet-backed President Najibullah, expelled eight thousand female undergraduate students from Kabul University, and fired a similar number of women schoolteachers. As the Taliban closed in on his palace, Najibullah told reporters: “If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. Afghanistan will turn into a center of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned into a center for terrorism.”⁷⁶ His predictions would prove all too accurate.

Saudi Arabian motives differed from those of both the United States and Pakistan. Saudi Arabia is, after all, the only modern nation-state created by jihad. The Saudi royal family, which came to power at the head of a movement of Wahhabi religious extremists, espoused Islamic radicalism elsewhere as a way to keep it under control in their kingdom. “Middle-class, pious Saudis flush with oil wealth,” Steve Coll writes, “embraced the Afghan cause as American churchgoers might respond to an African famine or a Turkish earthquake.... The money flowing from the kingdom arrived at the Afghan frontier in all shapes and sizes: gold jewelry dropped on offering plates by merchants’ wives in Jedda mosques; bags of cash delivered by businessmen to Riyadh charities as zakat, an annual Islamic tithe; fat checks written from semi-official government accounts by minor Saudi princes; bountiful proceeds raised in annual telethons led by Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh; and richest of all were the annual transfers from the Saudi General Intelligence Department, or Istakhbarat, to the CIA’s Swiss bank accounts.”⁷⁷

From the moment agency money and weapons started to flow to the mujahideen in 1980, Saudi Arabia matched U.S. payments dollar for dollar. The Saudis also bypassed Pakistan’s ISI and supplied funds directly to groups in Afghanistan they favored, particularly the one led by their own pious young millionaire Osama bin Laden. According to the CIA’s Milton Bearden, private Saudi and Arab funding of up to $25 million a month flowed to Afghan Islamist armies. Equally important, starting in 1986, Pakistan trained between 16,000 and 18,000 fresh Muslim recruits on the Afghan frontier every year, and another 6,500 or so were instructed by Afghans inside the country beyond ISI control. Most of these eventually joined bin Laden’s fundamentalist army of 35,000 “Arab Afghans.”⁷⁸

Even after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988, the CIA continued to follow Pakistani initiatives, such as aiding Hekmatyar’s successor, the one-eyed Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, and watched Afghanistan descend into one of the more horrific civil wars of the twentieth century. The CIA did not fully awaken to its naive and ill-informed reading of Afghan politics (which was a typical Cold War superpower’s blindness to the distinctiveness of contested local areas) until after bin Laden bombed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam on August 7, 1998. Even then, the agency defined the Islamist threat almost exclusively in terms of Osama bin Laden’s leadership of al-Qaeda and failed to take in the larger context, including the policies of Pakistani military intelligence, or the funds flowing to the Taliban and al-Qaeda from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Instead, it devoted itself solely to trying to capture or kill bin Laden himself.

On February 23, 1998, bin Laden had summoned newspaper and TV reporters to the camp at Khost, in the eastern part of Afghanistan, that the CIA had built for him at the height of the anti-Soviet jihad. There he announced the creation of a new organization—the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders—and issued a manifesto saying that “to kill and fight Americans and their allies, whether civilian or military, is an obligation for every Muslim who is able to do so in any country.” Just over five months later, he and his associates put this manifesto into effect with their devastating embassy truck bombings in Africa.

By then the CIA had identified bin Laden’s family compound in the open desert near Kandahar Airport, a collection of buildings called Tarnak Farm. It is possible that more satellite footage has been taken of this site than of any other place on Earth; one famous picture seems to show bin Laden standing outside the home of one of his wives. The CIA conceived an elaborate plot to kidnap bin Laden from Tarnak Farm with the help of Afghan operatives and spirit him out of the country, but CIA director George Tenet canceled the project because of the high risk of civilian casualties (for which the operations wing of the agency would later scorn him). Meanwhile, the Clinton White House ordered submarines to be stationed in the northern Arabian Sea with the map coordinates of Tarnak Farm preloaded into their missile-guidance systems. They were waiting for hard evidence from the CIA that bin Laden was in residence.⁷⁹

Within days of the East Africa bombings, President Clinton signed a top secret finding authorizing the CIA to use lethal force against bin Laden. On August 20, 1998, he ordered seventy-five cruise missiles, costing $750,000 each, to be fired at the Zawhar Kili camp (about seven miles south of Khost), reportedly the site of a major al-Qaeda meeting. The attack killed twenty-one Pakistanis but bin Laden had been forewarned, perhaps by Saudi intelligence. Two of the missiles fell into Pakistan, causing Islamabad to denounce the U.S. action. At the same time, the United States fired thirteen cruise missiles into a chemical plant in Khartoum that the CIA claimed was partly owned by bin Laden and secretly manufacturing nerve gas. (It was actually a pharmaceutical factory.)

The American public and many critics around the world were skeptical about both the claims and the motivation for the attacks because three days earlier Clinton had publicly confessed to his sexual liaison with Monica Lewinsky. The film Wag the Dog had also just been released. In it a president in the middle of an election campaign is charged with molesting a “Girl Guide” and manufactures a fake war against an Eastern European country in order to distract public attention. As a result, Clinton became more cautious, while he and his aides began to question the quality of the CIA’s intelligence they were being offered. The May 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by an American B-2 stealth bomber, thanks to faulty intelligence, further discredited the agency during Clinton’s air assault against Serbia. (A year later, DCI Tenet would fire an intelligence officer and reprimand six managers, including a senior official, for their bungling of that incident.)⁸⁰ The Clinton administration made two more unsuccessful attempts to capture or kill bin Laden. He was, of course, still around as the second Bush administration began, and he ordered the infamous strikes against the United States itself. He then survived the American invasion of Afghanistan to fight another day (and release endless videotaped analyses and exhortations to his followers for years to come).

In the end, the CIAs covert operations in Afghanistan were detrimental to any American foreign policy goals. They usually became entangled in hopeless webs of secrecy and ignorance, invariably laying the foundations for devastating future blowback operations. Former presidential terrorism adviser Richard Clarke argues that “the CIA used its classification rules not only to protect its agents but also to deflect outside scrutiny of its covert operations,” and Peter Tomsen, the American liaison with the Afghan anti-Soviet resistance during the late 1980s, concluded that “America s failed policies in Afghanistan flowed in part from the compartmented, top secret isolation in which the CIA always sought to work.”⁸¹

A more recent example of CIA folly overlaid by baroque attempts at secrecy, all on orders from the president, is the carrying out of extraordinary renditions—a bit of official jargon intended to hide one of the more morally depraved practices of the executive branch of the U.S. government. “Extraordinary renditions” simply mean the CIA kidnappings of terror suspects off the streets of foreign cities, flying them either to countries with no record of human rights protections or else to secret CIA prisons outside the U.S., and there having them tortured. The practice seems today to have become an integral part of the imperial presidency, protected by the argument developed by administration lawyers that in time of war (even when that war has been unilaterally declared by the president and deemed a generational struggle) the president as commander in chief is essentially beyond the law.

Secret police and state terrorist agencies normally try to disguise what they are doing by hiding behind bland euphemisms for their most odious operations. As long ago as the eighteenth century, Voltaire observed, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” On sanitizing language, the Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura writes, “By camouflaging pernicious activities in innocent or sanitizing parlance, the activities lose much of their repugnancy. Bombing missions are described as ‘servicing the target/ in the likeness of a public utility. The attacks become ‘clean, surgical strikes/ arousing imagery of curative activities. The civilians whom the bomb kills are linguistically converted to ‘collateral damage.’... In the vocabulary of the lawbreakers in Nixon’s administration, criminal conspiracy became a ‘game plan,’ and the conspirators were ‘team players,’ like the best of sportsmen.”⁸²

Typifying this deliberate whitewashing, the Nazi Party’s SS had its “transportations,” meaning the shipping of trainloads of prisoners to death camps; the British had their “civilizing mission” in Kenya, meaning the rounding up of members of the indigenous population and sodomizing, castrating, and killing thousands of them; the Japanese had their “comfort women,” meaning girls and women they kidnapped in occupied countries and forced at gunpoint to work as frontline prostitutes; and the CIA has its “renditions.” This is an unusual locution. In most dictionaries, a “rendition” is a performance or an interpretation of a piece of music or a role in a play, as in: “That was a nice rendition of Duke Ellington’s ‘Jubilee Stomp.’“ But the CIA uses it as a transitive verb—to render (as in “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”), to hand over, to surrender.

There is no evidence that such illegal kidnappings have ever contributed anything to the security of the United States, but according to retired FBI agent Dan Coleman, who blew the whistle on the CIA’s torturing of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, “The CIA liked rendition from the start. They loved that these guys would just disappear off the books, and never be heard of again. They were proud of it.”⁸³ The CIA added the term “extraordinary” to indicate that this was not just the capture of a fugitive abroad and the rendering of him or her to U.S. authorities to stand trial but that the target would disappear into the netherworld of some foreign prison, probably an idea learned from colleagues in Chile and Argentina when these countries were military dictatorships and from its work with Central American death squads during the Reagan administration.⁸⁴

As far as is publicly known, the first CIA rendition was a sting operation carried out jointly with the FBI in September 1987. Code-named “Operation Goldenrod,” it occurred in the wake of a series of airplane hijackings between 1984 and 1986. Congress had passed laws making air piracy and attacks on Americans abroad federal crimes, and in 1986 President Reagan signed a finding authorizing the CIA to kidnap foreigners wanted for terrorism and return them for trial in the United States. On June 11, 1985, Fawaz Yunis and four other heavily armed Lebanese took control of Royal Jordanian Airlines Flight 402 in Beirut. They ordered it flown out over the Mediterranean as far as Tunis, beat the Jordanian sky marshals on board, and returned to Beirut where they released the hostages, blew up the plane, and escaped. American hostages had been on board but were not harmed. Two years later, the CIA and FBI lured Yunis to a yacht in international waters off Cyprus with the promise that he would be part of a big drug-smuggling deal. Instead, he was taken into U.S. custody and transported to Washington. On March 14, 1989, he was convicted in federal court of aircraft piracy, hostage-taking, and conspiracy. On March 28, 2005, after sixteen years in an American prison, he was released and deported to Lebanon. There have been various legal challenges to the precedent set by this case, but it is generally regarded as a well-conducted law-enforcement operation.⁸⁵

The Clinton-Bush version of extraordinary rendition is far more sinister. Michael Scheuer, the former CIA official who criticized the agency and the Bush administration for their alleged timidity in pursuing terrorists, takes credit for creating the program. In an interview with the New Yorkers Jane Mayer, he claimed: “In 1995, American agents proposed the rendition program to Egypt, making clear that [the CIA] had the resources to track, capture, and transport terrorist suspects globally— including access to a small fleet of aircraft.”⁸⁶ At the time, Scheuer was in charge of the Bin Laden Unit in the CIAs Counterterrorism Center and was extremely frustrated by his inability to move against al-Qaeda operatives whom the agency had identified and located.

On the basis of the new agreement with Egypt, between 1995 and 1998 the CIA carried out a series of renditions aimed particularly at Islamic freedom fighters working in the Balkans, many of them originally from Egypt. Virtually all the people the CIA kidnapped in these operations were killed after being delivered into Egyptian hands. Predictably enough, these kidnappings generated blowback, although ordinary Americans did not perceive it as such because the actions that provoked the retaliation were, of course, kept totally secret. On August 5, 1998, the International Islamic Front for Jihad, in a letter to an Arab-language newspaper in London, promised a reprisal for recent U.S. renditions from Albania. Two days later, al-Qaeda blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania with a loss of 224 lives.⁸⁷ The U.S. renditions continued with the CIA and FBI carrying out some two dozen of them in 1999 and 2000.⁸⁸ These, in turn, helped provoke the attacks on the navy destroyer USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden on October 12, 2000. Former CIA director George Tenet testified before the 9/11 Commission that there were more than seventy renditions leading up to 9/11.

Within days of the September 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush expanded the original finding Bill Clinton had signed, giving the CIA authority to act without case-by-case approval from Washington.⁸⁹ No one knows the exact number of renditions after that date, but the New York Times quotes “former government officials” as saying, “Since the September 11 attacks, the CIA has flown 100 to 150 suspected terrorists from one foreign country to another.”⁹⁰ These numbers are probably a significant underestimate. Using methods I shall describe below, the London Times, CBS News’s 60 Minutes, and other sources were able to identify at least 600 flights of CIA airplanes to forty different countries, including 30 trips to Jordan, 19 to Afghanistan, 17 to Morocco, 16 to Iraq, with stops in Egypt, Libya, and Guantanamo.⁹¹ Aircraft known to be involved in CIA rendition operations have landed at British airports at least 210 times since 9/11.⁹²

In April 2006, investigations ordered by the European Parliament upped the number of such flights significantly beyond what had been previously imagined by anyone. According to Dan Bilefsky of the New York Times, “data gathered from air safety regulators and others found that the Central Intelligence Agency had flown 1,000 undeclared flights over European territory since 2001.” After this disclosure, the Council of Europe ordered its own investigation based mostly on flight logs provided by the European Union’s air traffic agency, Eurocontrol. Its sixty-seven-page report concluded that fourteen European nations, including Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Romania, and Poland, had colluded with the CIA to seize and hold terror suspects without filing charges against them, fly them to secret detention centers, and establish prisons for them in Europe and elsewhere. The report concluded that the United States and its collaborators had violated international human rights law, including the European Convention on Human Rights.⁹³

We have a few hints from official statements about the possible size of the rendition program. In his 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush said that some terrorism suspects who were not caught and brought to trial had been “otherwise dealt with,” and he then observed that “more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries, and many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.” In April 2003, Cofer Black, who from 1999 to 2002 had been head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, added: “A large number of terrorist suspects were not able to launch an attack last year because they are in prison. More than 3,000 of them are al-Qaeda terrorists and they were arrested in over 100 countries.”⁹⁴

According to Dana Priest and Joe Stephens of the Washington Post, “Much larger than the group of prisoners held by the CIA are those who have been captured and transported around the world by the CIA and other agencies of the U.S. government for interrogation by foreign intelligence services.”⁹⁵ If this statement is true, the number of post-9/11 renditions could be quite large. Human Rights Watch has identified at least twenty-four secret detention and interrogation centers worldwide operated by the CIA. These include: al-Jafr prison in the southern desert of Jordan; Kohat prison in Pakistan; holding sites in Afghanistan including in Kabul and Kandahar, at Bagram Air Base and Camp Salerno, near Khost; at least three locations in Iraq, including CIA-controlled parts of Abu Ghraib prison; at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Camp Echo complex, and the new Camp 6; a secret location at Al-Udeid Air Base, Qatar; prisons in Egypt, Thailand, and in brigs on U.S. ships at sea; at least two CIA prisons in the old Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe, probably in Poland and Romania; in Morocco at secret police headquarters in Temara, near the capital, Rabat, and at a new CIA torture center under construction at Ain Aouda, south of Rabat’s diplomatic district; and possibly at the U.S. naval base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.⁹⁶

The people held in this U.S. version of the gulag are known as “ghost detainees,” completely off-the-books. No charges are ever filed against them, and they are hidden away even from the inspectors of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In an unusual typology of rendition sites, Robert Baer, a former CIA operative in the Middle East and the author of Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, has commented, “We pick up a suspect or we arrange for one of our partner countries to do it. Then the suspect is placed on a civilian transport to a third country where, let’s make no bones about it, they use torture. If you want a good interrogation, you send someone to Jordan. If you want them to be killed, you send them to Egypt or Syria. Either way, the U.S. cannot be blamed as it is not doing the heavy work.”⁹⁷

Despite a near fanatical desire for secrecy, the CIA’s rendition capers began to be exposed to public scrutiny less than six weeks after 9/11. This was almost inevitable, although completely unanticipated by the agency, when it chose to conduct abductions via the world of civil aviation. The CIA’s operatives seemed not to understand that international airports are simply loaded with knowledgeable people at all hours of the day and night—aircrews, flight controllers, ticket clerks, baggage handlers, refuelers, airplane cleaners, police and customs officers, and passengers—many of whom are alert to everything going on around them.

The agency also appears to have been totally ignorant of the world of hobbyist airplane spotters or the fact that the Federal Aviation Administration’s registry of all airplanes licensed to American owners is Internet accessible, as is its archive of airplane logs and flight plans, or the degree to which the CIA’s criminal activities over several decades have mobilized a large cadre of amateur intelligence analysts. According to Mark Hosenball of Newsweek, “U.S. intel sources complain that ‘plane spotters’—hobbyists who photograph airplanes landing or departing local airports and post the pix on the Internet—made it possible for CIA critics to assemble details of a clandestine transport system the agency set up to secretly move cargo and people—including terrorist suspects— around the world.”⁹⁸

On October 26, 2001, a Pakistani journalist named Masood Anwar broke a story in an Islamabad newspaper. Pakistani intelligence officers, he reported, had handed over to U.S. authorities a Yemeni microbiologist named Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed. He was allegedly wanted in connection with the bombing of the USS Cole. The handover occurred early in the morning of October 23 in a remote area of Karachi Airport, where airport staff nonetheless observed and reported to Anwar that the captive was hustled aboard a white, twin-engined, turboprop Gulfstream V executive jet with the registration number N379P—and this is crucially important—painted on its tail. It took off at 2:40 a.m. for an unknown destination. As the Washington Post later reported, at 19:54:04 on October 26, Anwar’s story was posted on the FreeRepublic.com Web site. Thirteen minutes later a blogger provided the aircraft’s registered owner—namely, Premier Executive Transport Services, Inc., 339 Washington Street, Dedham, Massachusetts. Shortly after, another reader posted a message saying, “Sounds like a generic name. Kind of like Air America” (the CIA’s secret airline, not shut down until 1976, which had flown weapons and supplies into, and heroin out of, Laos during the Vietnam War).⁹⁹

I happen to know something about airplane spotting because from 1947 until the early 1960s, I was a passionate participant in this activity. In 1956,1 was one of three cofounders of the American Aviation Historical Society, the leading organization of airplane spotters and photographers in the United States, which in 2005 published the fiftieth volume of its journal.¹⁰⁰ Dana Priest describes airplane spotters as hobbyists “standing at the end of runways with high-powered binoculars and cameras to record the flights of military and private aircraft.”¹⁰¹ This is accurate enough as far as it goes, but there is more to airplane spotting than just collecting raw information. Watching airplanes closely and recording the squadron markings and serial numbers on them goes back to the last days of the London Blitz during World War II.

On January 2, 1941, with official support, Temple Press Ltd. published the first issue of the Aeroplane Spotter, a twelve-page newspaper intended to improve the quality of aircraft recognition among British civilian air defense volunteers. It ceased publication on July 10, 1948, after 217 issues. This legendary periodical included photos and silhouettes of the major aircraft types, both friend and foe, and was the first publication to pay attention to military serial numbers, changes in the registry of civilian aircraft, camouflage schemes, squadron markings, and unusual personal insignia. Such markings are important because, once a data base has been compiled, an analyst can use it to infer the number of a particular aircraft or its variant in service, to deduce the size and composition of squadrons, and to keep track of sales, modifications, and losses. The Aeroplane Spotter remains to this day an invaluable historical reference on the aircraft of the Luftwaffe, the Royal Air Force, and the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. Its legacy lives on in the activities of today’s airplane spotters, including their Web sites that publish not just photos and data but also search engines that can trace virtually any aircraft through its serial or registration number.¹⁰²

Based on the work of spotters, journalists, and airport workers around the world, many crucial details about the CIA’s rendition fleet have been made public. As of late September 2005, the CIA had leased a fleet of perhaps thirty-three aircraft that it has used for various purposes but particularly for extraordinary renditions.¹⁰³ Most of these planes have been identified and their “N” numbers recorded. (N is the international civil aviation code letter assigned to American airplanes, just as G stands for British planes, F for French, D for German, and / for Japanese.) The CIA acquired its fleet through classified contracts issued by an obscure military agency called the Navy Engineering Logistics Office (NELO) located in Arlington, Virginia. (NELO is not even listed in the U.S. Government Manual the official compilation of federal departments, agencies, and offices.)¹⁰⁴ The registered owners of the planes are some ten fake aviation companies with untraceable executives, many of whose addresses are post office boxes in northern Virginia (near CIA headquarters in Langley). The listed officers of the companies have social security numbers all issued when they were over fifty years old, strong evidence of the creation of a new or fake identity.

When the press identifies one of these aircraft and tries to contact the company that allegedly owns it, the aircraft is usually quickly “sold” to another shell company and the registration number changed. Thus, for example, the Gulfstream V, N379P, spotted at Karachi Airport in October 2001, was manufactured in 1999 (constructor’s number 581, the only identification on an aircraft that never changes and is always listed on registers) and initially licensed as N581GA. After the CIA acquired it, the number was changed to N379P and its phantom owner became Premier Executive Transport Services of Dedham, Massachusetts. It was engaged in several important renditions from 2001 to 2003. In December 2003, the Shannon Peace Campers, an antiwar group of airplane spotters at Shannon International Airport in Ireland, outed it on the Internet as the “Guantanamo Bay Express.” The same month N379P became N8068V, still owned by Premier Executive Transport. The Shannon spotters saw it three more times during 2004 in its new livery; then, on December 1, 2004, the plane was “sold” to Bayard Foreign Marketing, LLC, 921 S.W. Washington Street, Portland, Oregon, another CIA front company, and relicensed as N44982.¹⁰⁵

The CIA’s known fleet consists of two Gulfstreams, a small Cessna, three Lockheed Hercules cargo aircraft, a Gulfstream 1159a, a Learjet 35A, an old DC-3, two Boeing 737s, and a fifty-three-passenger De Havilland DH8. The De Havilland was photographed by plane spotters in Afghanistan.¹⁰⁶ The agency’s second Gulfstream was registered N829MG when it was used on October 8, 2002, to fly the Canadian citizen Maher Arar from John F. Kennedy Airport, New York, to Jordan and on to Syria, where he was held in a coffin-sized cell and tortured for ten months before being told that his arrest had been a mistake. After the exposure of this disgraceful incident, the Gulfstream’s registration was changed to N259SK.¹⁰⁷

The main base for these aircraft is a remote corner of Johnson County Airport in Smithfield, North Carolina, where they are serviced by Aero Contractors Ltd., a company founded in 1979 by Jim Rhyne, a legendary CIA officer and the former chief pilot for Air America.¹⁰⁸ The airport is convenient to nearby Fort Bragg, headquarters of the Special Forces, and has no control tower that would allow unauthorized persons to see into the enclave. The fact that Aero’s aircraft have permission to land at any U.S. military base worldwide is a dead giveaway to their provenance, since, according to the Chicago Tribunes John Crewdson,”Only nine companies [including Premier Executive Transport Services] ... have Pentagon permission to land aircraft at military bases worldwide.”¹⁰⁹

The CIA’s transfer of two Egyptian refugees from Bromma Airport, Stockholm, to Cairo on December 18, 2001, using Gulfstream N379P, is one of the best-documented renditions on record. On May 17, 2004, Stockholm’s TV4 program Kalla Fakta {Cold Facts) aired a more or less complete expose of what happened. The broadcasters obtained on-camera statements from many of the participants, including Sven Linder, former Swedish ambassador to Egypt; Arne Andersson, the Swedish Security Police (SAPO) officer in charge; Mary Ellen McGuiness, spokesperson for Premier Executive Transport Services; Hans Dahlgren, Swedish vice foreign minister; and above all Paul Forell, a police inspector with twenty-five years’ experience who was on duty at Bromma Airport that day. Many others spoke to TV4 on an anonymous basis.¹¹⁰

The Swedish case is of major political importance because it revealed that Swedish authorities collaborated with the CIA. It is now clear that in a number of European countries, some of the local intelligence people were in on these renditions to one degree or another and that throughout Europe several governments pretended ignorance and simply looked the other way. Given the one thousand CIA flights to European destinations, it is hard to imagine that local governments could have been completely ignorant of their purposes. Whether all Western European governments were involved; whether some of their intelligence services were functionally working for the CIA rather than their own governments; or whether deniability had been built into their arrangements with the CIA, we do not know. But obviously more was going on than merely bad Americans and good but ignorant Europeans.

No evidence has ever been offered that the two men the CIA kidnapped from Sweden and then delivered to the tender mercies of the Egyptians had participated in terrorist activities. In September 2000, after many years as a fugitive from the Egyptian dictatorship, Ahmed Agiza, age thirty-nine, with his wife and four children, arrived in Sweden (his fifth child was born after they were admitted). Muhammed al-Zery, age thirty-three, fled Egypt illegally in 1991, having been tortured by the authorities. He entered Sweden in August 1999. The Swedish Migration Board judged in both cases that the men, who were acquainted with each other but did not live in the same Swedish city, needed protection and should be granted asylum.

At about 5:00 p.m. on December 18, 2001, the Swedish secret police picked up Agiza on a street on his way home from a Swedish-language class in Karlstad; minutes later they nabbed al-Zery in a shop in Stockholm. Kjell Jönsson, al-Zery’s attorney, testified that he received a call from his client that afternoon, only to be interrupted when someone said, “Put the receiver down.” He promptly called the officials in charge of al-Zery ’s case at the Foreign Office but got only busy signals; the rest of the ministry was at a Christmas party. The police transported the two Egyptians to the Stockholm city airport, Bromma, an hour before it was scheduled to close. The police cars were quickly admitted and drove to the office of Police Inspector Paul Forell, who was on duty. There, obviously by prior agreement, they were met by eight balaclava-wearing Americans in business suits who had landed a few minutes earlier in N379P. The Americans used scissors to cut the clothes off Agiza and al-Zery, who were still in handcuffs and ankle chains. They then inserted suppositories presumably containing tranquilizers into their anuses, dressed them in diapers and jumpsuits, and took them out to the Gulfstream. At 21:49, the Egyptians, Americans, and two SAPO officers took off for Cairo.

The decision to expel the two Egyptians had been made at noon that same day by Prime Minister Goran Persson and his government, although there is some reason to believe that they thought they were merely extraditing the two at Egypt’s request and had no knowledge of the American involvement. The Swedish government received formal assurances from the Egyptians that the two men would be treated fairly and would not be harmed. TV4 claimed that the Americans had supplied evidence that the two Egyptians were terrorists. The TV journalists concluded, “A few months after the attack on the World Trade Center, Sweden accepted to become a pawn in the United States’ worldwide manhunt.” They traced the Gulfstream back to Premier Executive Transport Services in Massachusetts and, when they inquired about chartering the plane itself, were told: “It only flies for the U.S. government.” Arne Andersson of SAPO refused to supply details about the operation, saying to TV4 only, “This could disturb our relations with another service, and it could also affect the foreign relations of Sweden. As a nation.”

As details of what had happened began to leak out, embarrassing the Swedish government, its ambassador in Cairo was ordered to look into the matter. He discovered that after some two years of intermittent torture of both men, the Egyptian authorities decided that al-Zery was innocent and sent him back to his native village, ordering him not to leave it without official permission. They sentenced Agiza to twenty-five years in Masra Tora Prison for membership in a radical organization, presumably the Muslim Brotherhood. Visits to the prison by the Swedish ambassador produced only meetings with the warden and no interviews with Agiza, whose wife and five children remain in Sweden but are faced with the continual threat of deportation.

In the weeks immediately after 9/11, it seems that the CIA conducted a global vacuuming operation seeking to “disappear” suspicious young Islamic men from various countries, including our own. In the course of these activities the agency acquired the names of Agiza and al-Zery, then pressured the SAPO to arrest them and turn them over to a rendition team. At least some Swedish authorities involved knew that transferring any prisoner to a country where he might be tortured was a violation of Swedish law as well as of article 3 of the 1984 U.N. Convention Against Torture, which Sweden had signed and ratified. This case damaged Sweden’s reputation as a champion of the international protection of human rights.

In the spring of 2004, a Swedish parliamentary investigation concluded that CIA agents had indeed broken the country’s laws by subjecting the two Egyptians to “inhumane treatment.” The Swedish security police chief Klas Bergenstrand assured the press that his agency would never again allow foreign agents to interfere in Swedish affairs. In August 2005, the neighboring Danish government announced that it was prohibiting CIA flights of any sort through its airspace. The CIA has never said anything about this case.¹¹¹

The Swedish affair accomplished nothing other than ruining the lives of two men, a wife, and children, for no reason other than showing off the hubris of the CIA. By contrast, the CIA caper that began in Milan, Italy, on February 17, 2003, would be a farce—but one that severely worsened U.S. relations with a long-standing ally, interrupted an ongoing Italian intelligence operation, led to the disappearance and possible death of an Islamic imam, and politically weakened the then Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. The bunglers who thought up and executed this escapade have aptly been termed “the spies who came in from the hot tub.”¹¹²

On June 24, 2005, an Italian judge signed a 213-page criminal arrest warrant for thirteen CIA operatives, including the former Milan station chief Robert Seldon Lady, charging them with kidnapping an Egyptian in Milan who held political refugee status in Italy. The victim was also under Italian police surveillance as a possible recruiter of mujahideen for service in Afghanistan and Iraq, although recruiting fighters for foreign battles is not illegal in Italy. The warrants for the thirteen CIA men and women, together with their photos, were forwarded to the European police authority, which authorized their arrest anywhere on the continent. It is the first time that a fellow NATO member has ever filed criminal complaints against employees of the United States government acting in an official capacity. In late July, another Italian court issued arrest warrants for six more CIA operatives, bringing the total number to nineteen (thirteen men and six women). Ultimately, the Italians issued extradition requests to the United States for twenty-two CIA operatives based on a 477-page police analysis of what they had done.¹¹³ All of them except for Station Chief Lady were working under assumed names and had left Italy.

The abductee in this case is (or was) a forty-two-year-old Islamic cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as “Abu Omar.” In 1991, if not earlier, Omar fled Egypt for Albania because he belonged to the outlawed Muslim organization Jamaat al-Islamiyya and the police were after him. In Tirana, the Albanian capital, he worked for four years for various Islamic charities, but did not himself participate in any illegal activities. After 9/11, the Bush administration labeled the charities he worked for as supporters of terrorists. While in Tirana he married an Albanian woman, Marsela Glina, and they had a daughter and a son.

In 1995, at the urging of the CIA, the Albanian National Intelligence Service recruited Omar as an informer. He readily agreed to cooperate. The Albanians did not pay him, but they did help smooth out a dispute he had with the landlady of the bakery he had opened, and they fixed his residence permit after his marriage. Abu Omar was the first Arab willing to betray his colleagues to the Albanians, and the information the Albanians supplied to the CIA, thanks to him, greatly elevated the CIAs respect for their service. However, after a few weeks for unknown reasons—perhaps his fellow Islamic exiles got wind of his cooperation with the police—he and his family fled the country. The CIA later informed the Albanians that he was living in Germany. In 1997, he surfaced in Rome where he was granted political refugee status. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Milan, the center of radical Islamist activities in Italy, and began preaching at a mosque that had a reputation as a gathering place for religious and political extremists. The Italian counterterrorism police placed a tap on his telephone, while hiding microphones in his apartment and at another mosque where he preached. Although the police believed they had enough evidence to arrest him for “associating with terrorists,” they held off because the information they were gathering via the wiretaps was proving valuable and they were sharing it with the CIA.¹¹⁴

On Monday, February 17, 2003, shortly after noon, Abu Omar was walking down the Via Guerzoni toward a mosque to attend daily prayers when he was stopped by an officer of Italy’s paramilitary carabinieri police force. According to the Milan prosecutor, Armando Spataro, the Italian carabiniere had been hired by the CIA to approach Abu Omar and conduct a routine documents check. The participation of the Italian police officer, code-named “Ludwig,” has raised suspicions that the Sismi, the Italian intelligence service, was cooperating with the Americans. Former prime minister Berlusconi’s office has repeatedly denied any role, but the Milanese prosecutors are doubtful and are continuing their investigation.¹¹⁵

According to a passerby’s account, two men speaking “bad” Italian then emerged from a parked white van, sprayed a chemical in Abu Omar’s face, and hustled him into the van, which drove away at high speed followed by at least one and possibly two other cars. Between 2 and 5 p.m., the van drove northeast to the NATO air base at Aviano where it was met by a U.S. Air Force officer, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Romano, who escorted it to the flight line. Abu Omar was put aboard a civilian Learjet and flown to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. There, he was transferred to a civilian Gulfstream, which departed at 8:30 that night for Cairo. When Omar’s plane arrived in Cairo early on the morning of February 18, Egyptian authorities took him into custody. Accompanying Omar to Egypt in the Gulfstream was CIA Milan station chief Robert Lady.¹¹⁶

Although Italian political leaders have steadfastly maintained that they did not collaborate in any way with this kidnapping, it is obvious that police authorities knew a great deal about it. The nineteen-person CIA abduction team of commandos, drivers, and lookouts left an astonishing trail of evidence that suggests they were utterly indifferent to the possibility that they were being observed. The first operative arrived in Milan on December 7, 2002, and stayed at the Milan Westin Palace, according to court documents. The others started arriving in early January and by February 1, 2003, virtually all of them were there. They did not hide in safe houses or private homes but checked into four-star palaces like the Milan Hilton ($340 a night) and the Star Hotel ($325 a night). Seven of the Americans stayed at the Principe di Savoia—billed as “one of the world’s most luxuriously appointed hotels”—for between three days and three weeks at nightly rates of $450. Eating lavishly at gourmet restaurants, they ran up bills of at least $144,984, which they paid for with Diners Club cards that matched their fake passports. At each hotel, the staff photocopied their passports, which is how the police obtained their photos if not their real names.¹¹⁷ After the delivery of Abu Omar to Aviano, four of the Americans checked into luxury hotels in Venice and others took vacations along the picturesque Mediterranean coast north of Tuscany, all still on the government tab.

Most embarrassingly, the U.S. embassy in Rome had supplied the CIA agents with a large number of Italian cell phones, on which they communicated with each other while planning the abduction, during the actual operation, and en route to Aviano. All their transmissions were recorded by the Italian police. No one can explain this lapse in tradecraft. Unless its power is completely off and its antenna retracted, a European mobile phone remains in constant contact with the nearest cell-base station even when not in use. Since a phone is served by several base stations at any given time, investigators can easily triangulate its location. In cities like Milan, where the network of base stations is dense and overlapping, such tracking can be done with a margin of error of just a few yards.¹¹⁸ Thus, the Italian police were able to follow everything that the nineteen agents did both prior to and on the actual day of the rendition.

After Abu Omar’s disappearance, the Italian police opened a missing person s investigation but did not pursue it very vigorously. That changed radically in April and May 2004, when Omar unexpectedly telephoned his wife from Cairo and explained that he had been kidnapped and taken to U.S. air bases in Italy and Germany, flown to Cairo, and tortured by the Egyptian police. The Italian authorities recorded these calls, having kept the wiretap on Omar’s apartment in place. He informed his wife that he had been let out of prison but remained under house arrest. There is speculation that, as a result of reports on these conversations in Italian newspapers, the Egyptian police rearrested him. In any case, as far as is known, he remains in Egyptian custody, not charged with any crime but allowed occasional visits by his mother.

There is still no explanation for the CIA’s sloppy work in Milan— except that some of its operatives seemed to have wanted a nice holiday at the taxpayers’ expense and believed they could operate with complete impunity in Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy. The Milan case goes into the record books as one more foolish and counterproductive felony committed by the CIA on the orders of the president. Ironically, the Milan CIA station chief had bought a house in Asti, near Turin, and planned to retire there. As the police bore down on him, he and his wife hurriedly fled their home, and a comfortable old age in Italy ceased to be an option for them.

Unfortunately, carrying out extraordinary renditions such as the ones in Sweden and Italy, torturing captives in secret prisons, shipping weapons to Islamic jihadists without checking their backgrounds or motives, and undermining democratically elected governments that are not fully on our political wavelength are the daily work of the Central Intelligence Agency. That was not always the case nor was it the intent of its founders or the expectations of its officials during its earliest years. As conceived in the National Security Act of 1947, the CIAs main function was to compile and analyze raw intelligence to make it useful to the president. Its job was to help him see the big picture, put the latest crisis in historical and economic perspective, give early warning on the likely crises of the future, and evaluate whether political instability in one country or another was of any importance or interest to the United States. It was a civilian, nonpartisan organization, without vested interests such as those of the military-industrial complex, and staffed by seasoned, occasionally wise analysts with broad comparative knowledge of the world and our place in it. As the New York Times’s Tim Weiner notes, “Once upon a time in the Cold War, the CIA could produce strategic intelligence. It countered the Pentagon’s wildly overstated estimates of Soviet military power. It cautioned that the war in Vietnam could not be won by military force. It helped keep the Cold War cold.”¹¹⁹

One of the CIA’s best-known historians, Thomas Powers, laments, “The resignation of Porter Goss after 18 months of trying to run the Central Intelligence Agency and the nomination [subsequently confirmed] of General Michael Hayden to take his place make unmistakable something that actually occurred a year ago: the CIA, as it existed for 50 years, is gone.”¹²⁰ I think it was actually gone long before. My own view is that President Bush’s manipulation of intelligence to deceive the country into going to war and then blaming his failure on the CIA’s “false intelligence” delivered only the final coup de grace to the CIA’s strategic-intelligence function. Henceforth, the CIA will no longer have even a vestigial role in trying to discern the forces influencing our foreign policies. That work will now be done, if it is done at all, by the new director of national intelligence. The downgraded CIA will attend to such things as assassinations, dirty tricks, renditions, and engineering foreign coups. In the intelligence field it will be restricted to informing our presidents and generals about current affairs—the “Wikipedia of Washington,” as John McLaughlin, deputy director and acting director of central intelligence from October 2000 to September 2004, calls it.¹²¹

Thomas Powers is unquestionably correct when he writes, “Historically the CIA had a customer base of one—the president.” But equally historically, it was not understood at the beginning that the CIA would become the president’s private army as well as his private adviser. Over the years, presidents shaped what the CIA would become. They increasingly believed that its strategic intelligence was a nuisance while its covert side greatly enhanced their freedom of action. Perhaps the idea of supplying leaders with strategic perspectives from an independent, nonpolitical source was always unrealistic. It seemed that the CIA only worked more or less as it was intended when the secretary of state and the director of central intelligence were brothers—as John Foster and Allen Dulles were under President Eisenhower. The reality was and is that presidents like having a private army and do not like to be contradicted by officials not fully under their control. Thus the clandestine service long ago began to surpass the intelligence side of the agency in terms of promotions, finances, and prestige. In May 2006, Bush merely put strategic analysis to sleep once and for all and turned over truth-telling to a brand-new bureaucracy of personal loyalists and the vested interests of the Pentagon.

This means that we are now blinder than usual in understanding what is going on in the world. But, equally important, our liberties are also seriously at risk. The CIAs strategic intelligence did not enhance the power of the president except insofar as it allowed him to do his job more effectively. It was, in fact, a modest restraint on a rogue president trying to assume the prerogatives of a king. The CIAs bag of dirty tricks, on the other hand, is a defining characteristic of the imperial presidency. It is a source of unchecked power that can gravely threaten the nation—as George W. Bush’s misuse of power in starting the war in Iraq demonstrated. The so-called reforms of the CIA in 2006 have probably further shortened the life of the American republic.

of the U.S.’s European Command, June 2003

If you dream that everyone might be your enemy, one day they may become just that.

—NICK COHEN,

air force chief of staff, November 29,1957

On March 23, 1983, in a speech promoting greater defense spending against the Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan challenged the “scientific community”—”those who gave us nuclear weapons”—and Americans in general to launch a huge research and development (R&D) effort to create an impermeable antimissile shield in space. He would call this endeavor the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, and, in his vision, it would employ new high-concept technologies such as chemical lasers in space and on Earth to make nuclear weapons forever “impotent and obsolete.”¹

The proposal was meant in part to deflect a large-scale antinuclear movement that had developed in the United States and that had, the previous June, put almost a million protesters on the streets of New York. It was promptly attacked by these same critics and derisively labeled “Star Wars” (after director George Lucas’s space opera). However, Reagan proved why he was known as the “Teflon president.” He promptly appropriated the term. (“If you’ll pardon my stealing a film line—the Force is with us.”) And so a vast military-industrial undertaking to conquer and militarize space began into which billions of dollars have since been poured.²

As it happened, Reagan’s impenetrable shield in space was a mere fantasy and, over the years, all that remains in practicable terms is a fabulously expensive, ground-based, minimalist antiballistic missile system. A series of futuristic conceptions, still in various stages of research and, in some cases, actual development, is aimed not at protecting the American people from a nuclear attack by another country but at the future control of the planet from space and the militarization of the heavens. These new devices included not only antisatellite satellites but weaponry in space that could be fired at Earth.

On the air force’s developmental drawing boards, for instance, are ideas that would once have been found only in science fiction novels, including the aptly nicknamed “Rods from God,” officially known as “Hypervelocity Rod Bundles.” These are meant, according to reporter Tim Weiner of the New York Times, “to hurl cylinders of tungsten, titanium, or uranium from the edge of space to destroy targets on the ground, striking at speeds of about 7,200 miles an hour with the force of a small nuclear weapon.”³ Another futuristic weapons program, according to Weiner, “would bounce laser beams off mirrors hung from space satellites or huge high-altitude blimps, redirecting the lethal rays down to targets around the world.”

Far closer to actual deployment is the CAV, or Common Aero Vehicle. According to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, it will be “an unmanned maneuverable spacecraft that would travel at five times the speed of sound and could carry 1,000 pounds of munitions, intelligence sensors, or other payloads.”⁴ Part of Donald Rumsfeld’s planned “Global Strike Force,” it theoretically could hit any target on Earth with a massive dose of conventional munitions on a half hour’s notice and the first generation of such weapons is now scheduled to be ready in 2010.

Although, as far as we know, the Bush administration has not officially issued a presidential directive that would allow the deployment of U.S. weaponry in space, Weiner reports that the air force has been pushing hard for such a directive. Whether made official or not, the militarization of space has clearly been on the secret agenda for some time. Somewhere between boondoggle and imperial venture, the program to conquer the “high frontier” is also essentially a program for creating the equivalent of bases in space where, once the issue of militarization is settled, no SOFAs would be necessary. There would be no foreign governments to negotiate with, pay off, or placate; no issues of crime and justice to sort out. Best of all, the weaponizing of space enables us to project power anywhere in the world from secure bases of operation. It is, by definition, the global high ground.

Nonetheless, of all the high-frontier weapons into which R&D money has been poured since President Reagan’s speech, only one—the distinctly Earth-bound “defensive shield”—has come into even partial being. That is the modest antiballistic missile (ABM) defense system being installed at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. It is no longer—as Reagan envisioned—focused on defending against a massive nuclear strike by a major enemy but on a tiny strike or even an errant missile from a “rogue state” like North Korea.

How this came to pass, after the Soviet Union disappeared and the threat of a missile attack receded, is a tale about the military-industrial complex at its most persistent. As the Pentagon commentator Alexander Zaitchik has observed, “The line connecting missile defense and space weapons is direct, thick, and no secret.”⁵ In the 1990s, neoconservative lobbyists joined with big arms manufacturers and ambitious military officers, none of whom actually cared whether a national missile-defense system could stop a nuclear attack. Their interest was in the staggering sums such a project would require. By manipulating a Republican Congress and creating a missile defense lobby in both houses, they achieved all their goals, although actual missile defense remained as distant as ever. General Eugene Habiger, head of the U.S. Strategic Command in the mid-1990s, said, “A system is being deployed that doesn’t have any credible capability.” Philip Coyle, former assistant secretary of defense for test and evaluation in the Clinton administration, concluded that the United States had squandered over $100 billion dollars of taxpayers’ money on a “high-tech scarecrow.”⁶

The neoconservative mind-set that brought this project to fruition also had its origins in the Reagan years, when many young strategists, usually with neither military service nor war experience on their resumes, became impatient with the influence of internationalists and realists—the people who had dominated U.S. foreign policy making since World War II. They were also convinced that the collapse of the Soviet Union had been significantly due to U.S. technological prowess and that pouring more money into advanced technology was a sure way to achieve perpetual domination of the world. The only real debate among them was over whether American hegemony “would be welcomed as the cutting edge of human progress,” or overwhelming American power—”shock and awe”—would be enough to terrify others into submission.⁷ They were committed to ending all arms control treaties that constrained U.S. power, to a vast expansion of spending on armaments as well as futuristic armaments research, and to a belief that the planet could easily be mastered from the high frontier of outer space. A typical member of this group was Frank Gaffney Jr., founder of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), creator of the congressional missile defense lobby, and behind-the-scenes player in the policy shifts of the 1990s that would lead to the near-weaponization of space.

Gaffney’s views are close to those of the neocon polemicist Richard Perle, with whom he worked in the late 1970s in the office of the Democratic senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, from Washington State, home of the Boeing Corporation. Jackson influenced both men through his passionate anticommunism and his easy acceptance of the title “senator from Boeing.” Gaffney went on to become a staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee from February 1981 to August 1983. President Reagan then appointed him deputy assistant secretary of defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy, under his mentor Richard Perle. Rather like John Bolton in the second Bush administration, Gaffney distinguished himself at the Pentagon by his hostility to all arms control agreements. In 1987, the new secretary of defense, Frank Carlucci, let both Perle and Gaffney go, and Gaffney set out on his new career as a promoter of space weaponry.

When Gaffney returned to civilian life, he created the CSP, which set out to challenge the government’s intelligence on the dangers of future nuclear missile threats from “rogue nations” and to promote the defense of our space assets. The CSP is funded primarily by the major weapons manufacturers in the missile defense field—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), and others—and by conservative donors such as the Coors family, Richard Mellon Scaife, and the Colorado heiress Helen Krieble.⁸ CSP has received well over $3 million in corporate donations since its founding in 1988.

The first major success of Gaffney’s special-interest-funded think tank came in 1994, when Republican representatives Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey released their “Contract with America”—a political platform with which the Republican Party hoped to regain control of Congress. It contained a plank that called for “renewing Americas commitment to an effective national missile defense system by requiring the Defense Department to deploy anti-ballistic missile systems.”⁹ An American ABM was the only weapons program included in the contract, and Gaffney took credit for having persuaded Gingrich and Armey to include it.

After the Republicans became the majority party in Congress in 1994, their leaders discovered that they still could not move decisively on missile defense because many of the members were suffering from “sticker shock.” The Congressional Budget Office estimated that a basic ground-based system against only a minimally armed “rogue state” would cost up to $60 billion. Republican representative Curt Weldon, an advisory board member of CSP, decided that the best and most time-honored way to rouse the American people and their representatives to action would be to scare them to death. As a result, he obtained passage of a resolution calling for the creation of a special commission to assess the rogue-nation ballistic-missile threat to the United States. This commission, chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, issued its report in July 1998. Crucially, it disputed the CIAs estimate that any nation without a large and advanced industrial base would need at least ten years to fifteen years to build a ballistic missile, claiming instead that a mere five years would be sufficient.

In an incisive analysis, Michelle Ciarrocca and William D. Hartung, weapons experts at the World Policy Institute, pointed out that the congressionally mandated commission was anything but impartial on such matters. Most of its members were affiliated with the CSP and were eager to opt for a worst-case scenario by systematically ignoring the difficulties involved both in missile development and in the miniaturization of the nuclear warhead to be fitted to it. “The five year estimate was based in significant part on briefings from missile engineers at major U.S. defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing—hardly unbiased sources, given the billions their firms stand to gain from building a missile defense system to thwart the alleged threat posed by Third World ICBMs.”¹⁰

The Rumsfeld report, unbalanced and deceptive though it was, achieved what the high-frontier congressmen, militarists, and industrialists behind it wanted. In mid-March 1999, both houses of Congress overwhelmingly passed the National Missile Defense Act, which declared: “It is the policy of the United States to deploy a national missile defense.” Just before the House voted, Donald Rumsfeld, then a civilian who had served as secretary of defense over twenty years earlier, gave a ninety-minute briefing to some 250 of its members.¹¹ In recognition of his services, Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy later bestowed its Keeper of the Flame Award on him at a gala fund-raising dinner.

There was still one major obstacle—the president himself. Bill Clinton was by then adept at capitulating to right-wing pressures from both parties as part of a strategy of co-opting Republican positions and then not implementing them. He had already allowed several billion dollars to be spent on national missile defense, but on September 1, 2000, he decided not to deploy the ABM system. “I simply cannot conclude with the information I have today that we have enough confidence in the technology, and the operational effectiveness of the entire NMD [national missile defense] system, to move forward to deployment.” He would, he declared, leave to his successor the decision whether or not to build it.¹² Unfortunately for the country and the world, five months later George W. Bush became president and Donald Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon.

In addition to the missile defense commission s report of 1998, Rumsfeld brought with him a second report that urged the secretary of defense to prepare for possible warfare in space. He had chaired the group that wrote this inflammatory report just as he had the first missile-defense commission. The Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization delivered its final report to Congress on January 11, 2001, a few days before Bush was sworn in and Rumsfeld took over the Department of Defense. The report was the brainchild of the congressional missile defense lobby, which got it through Congress as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2000 and stacked the commission with seven—out of thirteen—members from aerospace companies that would benefit directly from any expanded space weapons programs. Many of them were former admirals and generals who had retired into highly compensated positions as executives or board members of munitions companies. The 2001 report they produced famously warned that the United States “is an attractive candidate for a ‘space Pearl Harbor,’“ and went on to state:

The United States must develop, deploy, and maintain the means to deter attack on and to defend vulnerable space capabilities. Explicit national security guidance and defense policy is needed to direct development of doctrine, concepts of operations, and capabilities for space, including weapons systems that operate in space and that can defend assets in orbit and augment air, land, and sea forces. This requires a deterrence strategy for space, which in turn must be supported by a broader range of space capabilities.¹³

Statements of congressional commissions usually go unread and have little lasting influence. But the two Rumsfeld documents—the one from 1998 on missile defense and the 2001 report on protecting space assets— have assumed the status of holy writ even though both are biased and partisan in the extreme. As Michael Dobbs reported in the Washington Post, “Since the beginning of the Bush administration ... and Rumsfeld’s reappointment as Defense Secretary, the conclusions of the Rumsfeld Commission have been elevated to quasi-doctrinal status within the government, according to several officials. ‘Nobody dares say a word against Rumsfeld, at least in public,’ said one government nonproliferation expert.”¹⁴ The country was thus finally committed to building and deploying a system to destroy nuclear weapons delivered by missiles and ultimately to place weapons in outer space.

It is important to stress that at present no country has antisatellite weapons in space, that the only country talking about a possible space war is the United States, and that the only threat ever uncovered to U.S. space assets was six handheld Global Positioning System ground-jammers that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed. Nonetheless, air force spokesmen have used the 2001 report to insinuate that a space war is both inevitable and now a settled part of military doctrine.¹⁵ They have enthusiastically manufactured threats that serve their own institutional interests, not the security of the United States.

The head of the Air Force Space Command, General Lance Lord, has led the charge. “Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny,” he told an air force conference in September 2004. “Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future.” “Simply put,” he said to Congress, “it’s the American way of fighting.” We must have “freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack” in space.¹⁶ The former secretary of the air force and director of the National Reconnaissance Office Peter B. Teets, once the president and chief operating officer of the nation’s biggest arms manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, assured the Air Force Association in a January 2003 speech, “If America doesn’t weaponize space, an enemy will.”¹⁷ Keith Hall, Clinton’s assistant secretary of the air force for space, whom the George W. Bush administration retained, commented, “With regard to space dominance, we have it, we like it, and we’re going to keep it.”¹⁸

On August 2, 2004, the air force for the first time issued a new statement of official doctrine on what it calls “counterspace operations.” According to General John Jumper, air force chief of staff, “Counterspace operations are critical to success in modern warfare.... Counterspace operations have defensive and offensive elements.... These operations may be utilized throughout the spectrum of conflict and may achieve a variety of effects from temporary denial to complete destruction of the adversary’s space capabilities.”¹⁹

None of these military officers shows any interest in the arms race in space that their policies are guaranteed to elicit. Yet, it is inconceivable, observes Theresa Hitchens, an authority on weapons in space and vice president of the independent Washington research organization Center for Defense Information, “that either Russia or China would allow the United States to become the sole nation with space-based weapons.” She quotes a 1998 article in Airpower Journal, by Lieutenant Colonel Bruce M. DeBlois, “Once a nation embarks down the road to gain a huge asymmetric advantage, the natural tendency of others is to close that gap. An arms race tends to develop an inertia of its own.”²⁰ The air force, however, has an answer to such thinking. Everett Dolman, a neoconservative and a professor in the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, the air force’s graduate school for airpower and space power strategists at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, argues, “The time to weaponize and administer space for the good of global commerce is now, when the United States could do so without fear of an arms race there. The short answer is, if you want an arms race in space, do nothing now.”²¹ Dolman thinks it is our destiny to “seize military control of low Earth orbit. Only the United States can be trusted to regulate space for the benefit of all.”²²

Virtually all of the air force’s rhetoric about a future space war is ideological posturing, similar to the propaganda it put out at the end of the Eisenhower administration and the beginning of the Kennedy years about a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union. The purpose then was to beef up the air force’s budget and carve out turf justifying its continued growth as an organization. There was no missile gap, as the leaders of the American government knew from U-2 flights over the USSR and photographs from the first Corona spy satellites.²³ Similarly today, there can be no rationale for a space war because one unintended but unavoidable consequence would be to destroy our own preeminent position in space. A major but little-noticed reason for this is because a conflict in space using antisatellite weapons of any kind would vastly increase the amount of orbiting garbage, which would threaten our whole network of military and commercial spacecraft. That, in turn, would threaten the whole American— even planetary—way of life. Yet space debris is a subject that the air force’s “counterspace doctrine” never so much as mentions.²⁴

Space, particularly in low Earth orbits (LEO), is anything but empty. The space age is hardly forty-five years old and we have already filled its most critical zones with thousands of pieces of lethal junk. The radars of the air force’s Space Surveillance Network can see objects as small as ten centimeters—the size of a baseball—in low Earth orbit and to about one meter in higher geosynchronous orbits, where most of the world’s communications and broadcast satellites reside. The air force is currently tracking some 13,400 man-made objects in space, of which only a few hundred are active satellites. It acknowledges that there are more than 100,000 pieces of smaller, untrackable debris, each about the size of a marble (one centimeter) and millions of still smaller fragments. NASA officials have estimated that there may be about four million pounds of space junk in LEO alone.²⁵ This debris includes dead or dying satellites, pieces of spent rocket boosters, all manner of metal shrouds and fairings, tools, nuts, bolts, and clamps of every size and description, lens caps, and even frozen sewage. In LEO they are traveling at the same speed as the space shuttle—17,500 miles per hour—or they would fall into the Earth’s atmosphere and be burned up.

Astronaut Sally Ride, the first woman in space aboard the Challenger space shuttle in 1983 and 1984, a member of the presidential commission that investigated the Challenger’s explosion in 1986, and a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, has been adamant that the use of antisatellite weapons would be “disastrous” because of the debris they would be likely to create. On her inaugural mission in June 1983, an incident fixed her opinion on this subject: “About halfway through the flight there was a small pit in the window of the space shuttle and we didn’t know what it was. An awful lot of analysis was done while we were in orbit to make sure that the strength of the window would sustain reentry. It did. We were all fine. But the analysis afterward showed that our window had been hit by an orbiting fleck of paint, and the relative velocities were enough that the paint actually made a small but visible gouge in the window. Well, a fleck of paint is not the same as a small piece of metal travelling at that same speed. So, as soon as you start increasing the amount of junk in a low Earth orbit, you have an unintended byproduct that starts putting some of your own quite valuable satellites at possible risk.”²⁶

Joel Primack, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, agrees: “Weaponization of space would make the debris problem much worse, and even one war in space could encase the entire planet in a shell of whizzing debris that would thereafter make space near the Earth highly hazardous for peaceful as well as military purposes.... Every person who cares about the human future in space should also realize that weaponizing space will jeopardize the possibility of space exploration.”²⁷ Primack observes that the density of debris is already so great at the 900-to 1,000-kilometer altitude (563 to 625 miles) and at the 1,500- to 1,700-kilometer altitude (938 to 1,063 miles) that pieces of junk colliding with each other could set off a chain reaction or cascade of collisions—the Kessler Effect, predicted mathematically in the 1970s by the NASA scientist Donald Kessler—that would make the zones useless.²⁸ The Council on Foreign Relations Study Group on Space Weapons defines space debris as “unguided, hyper-velocity kinetic-energy weapon[s]” and concludes, “Because the United States owns a significant majority of the world’s satellites, it would suffer disproportionately from any increase in the amount of space debris.” Its overall conclusion is that “space weapons are not suited to the threats currently facing the United States in space or are outpaced by terrestrial alternatives.”²⁹ All forms of space weapons, it noted, cost much more than terrestrial weapons systems, which of course do not have to be boosted into orbit, a cost that commercial operators put at between $300 million to $350 million per satellite.³⁰ Earth-based weapons such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), cruise missiles, ICBMs, or submarine-launched intermediate-range ballistic missiles can do anything space-based weapons can, and a Tomahawk cruise missile costs a mere $600,000.

The air force has been conspicuously reluctant to discuss these issues. On September 15, 2004, the Pentagons Missile Defense Agency (MDA) said in a public statement that it was contemplating putting space-based missile interceptors in orbit by 2012 but acknowledged that such “kinetic kill vehicles,” in Pentagon jargon—weapons that destroy their targets simply by colliding with them at very high speeds—would create a great deal of space debris. It noted that a chunk of debris ten centimeters in diameter is likely to be as damaging to an orbiting spacecraft as twenty-five sticks of dynamite.³¹ Nonetheless, it planned to proceed with its antisatellite interceptors.

Some air force officers take the view, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that debris in low Earth orbit does not last long and quickly falls back into the atmosphere where it is burned up. The MDA report states, for instance, that in most cases debris that might be created by a missile-defense intercept would re-enter the atmosphere before completing a full orbit, and therefore would put satellites at risk only briefly. It advocates that vulnerable spacecraft such as the International Space Station and the Hubble Telescope be maneuvered out of the way to avoid collisions with debris. There is some evidence that debris resulting from missiles fired from the Earth might indeed quickly fall back into the atmosphere, but this would not be true of debris from space-based kinetic vehicles.³² Debris from satellites placed in the higher geosynchronous orbits will, of course, never descend into the atmosphere but go on spinning around the Earth forever. That is why much greater attention should be paid to moving spent communications satellites into “graveyard orbits ,” reserved for space junk and off-limits to voyagers and satellites.

Meanwhile, the Orbital Debris Quarterly News, published by NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, continues to monitor and report on what the space garbage is actually doing. The News was first published in August 1996 and is now in its tenth volume. On January 17, 2005, according to the April 2005 issue, the remains of a U.S. Thor 2A upper stage rocket that had been used back in 1974 to put a satellite in orbit rear-ended a large fragment of the third stage of a Chinese CZ-4 launch vehicle that had exploded in March 2000. The collision altered the orbits of both pieces of debris and three more chunks—large enough to be detected and catalogued—were knocked off the old American rocket. Orbital Debris Quarterly News concluded, “As the number of objects in Earth orbit increases, the likelihood of accidental collisions will also increase. Currently, hundreds of close approaches ... between catalogued objects occur on a daily basis. If future spacecraft and rocket bodies are not removed from LEO within a moderate amount of time after the end of [a] mission, e.g., within 25 years, the rate of accidental collisions will increase markedly later in the century.”³³

Despite air force propaganda, there is no way to protect our satellites by putting weapons in space. The only rational active defense would involve building redundancy into our space systems so that the loss of a particular spacecraft would not cripple us; the maintenance of replacement satellites ready to be launched into orbit whenever they are needed; the hardening of electronic components on particularly important satellites against microwave, laser, or other directed-energy attacks; and finally learning how better to disguise the laser, radar, visible, and infrared signatures of satellites, making them much harder to target in orbit.

Thirty years ago, during the period of Japan’s high-speed economic growth, I was in Tokyo talking with an official from that country’s trade ministry. Japan was then, as today, totally dependent on imported petroleum from the Middle East. I pointed out that Japan’s supertankers were highly vulnerable. What, I asked, would Japan do if a hostile power sank one of its tankers in the narrow straits around Singapore? His answer was straightforward: call Lloyd’s Insurance Company. It would be much cheaper to construct a new tanker than to defend the sea-lanes from Japan to the Persian Gulf by building a navy. There is a lesson in this for the United States. We cannot afford our air force’s plans to protect our space assets militarily, and the air force does not know how to do so in any case.

The missile-defense program is easily the most important place to examine the air force’s failures. There are potentially three ways to bring down an ICBM: first, in its boost phase, when the warhead and the rocket are still joined and both are heading up through the atmosphere to outer space; second, after the warhead has separated from the booster and is speeding through space toward its target; and finally, in its terminal phase, the extremely short period (measured in seconds) when the warhead reenters the atmosphere and plunges toward the Earth. The Clinton administration worked only on a midcourse interception by ground-based “kill vehicles.” The Bush administration took over this project and accelerated it but added brand-new and very expensive research objectives: downing a missile shortly after liftoff and during its final descent. Dubbed the “multi-tiered missile defense,” it aimed at giving the United States as many opportunities as possible to stop an incoming missile.

More than five years after George W. Bush committed himself to an initial deployment by election day 2004, elaborate plans had been laid and huge amounts of money spent but nothing had been completed that actually worked. Shortly after June 13, 2002, when President Bush’s withdrawal of the United States from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty became final, Arizona senator Jon Kyl declared that the United States was now dedicated to “peace through strength, not peace through paper.”³⁴ In fact, the ABM Treaty had restrained the only country truly capable of launching an attack on the United States with intercontinental ballistic missiles, namely, Russia, and replaced it with—paper.

Unsurprisingly, the Clinton-era Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, or GMD, as it is known within the Pentagon and the missile industry, remains by far the most advanced and important part of the whole multi-tiered system, as revealed in budget priorities. In the fiscal year 2002 budget, for example, $3,762.3 million was devoted to GMD whereas boost-segment research got $599.8 million and terminal-segment research $200.1 million.³⁵ (Actually, that terminal-phase figure should be increased by $898.7 million, that year’s funding for the Patriot PAC-3 missile, reported separately in the defense budget and the current favorite when it comes to trying to hit a warhead just before impact.)

Meanwhile, the GMD system as it is being conceived and built will, at best, be capable of hitting a single long-range missile or a very few of them launched by a technologically unsophisticated Third World nation like North Korea. Russia has already deployed ICBMs that can defeat any antiballistic-missile system we could conceivably produce, and China will no doubt do so soon. On March 7, 2006, the commander of American forces in South Korea, General Burwell B. Bell, told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “In the years since the late nineties, the last six years, seven years, we have seen very little activity by the North Koreans to actively continue to develop and test long-range missile systems.”³⁶ Nonetheless, three months later, the U.S. military announced that North Korea had a Taepodong-2, its longest-range rocket, sitting on a launching pad fueled and ready for flight. It consists of a set of old Russian Scuds bolted together. The U.S. military claimed that it had a range of up to 9,300 miles, more than enough to reach the U.S. mainland, and that the United States had only a limited ability to shoot down such a missile should North Korea launch it.³⁷ On July 4, 2006, North Korea test-fired this and other shorter-range missiles. The Taepodong-2 crashed after forty-two seconds of flight.

The Ground-based Midcourse Defense system that we have been building against North Korea consists of three separate elements: an array of interceptor missiles housed in silos in the ground that are at least theoretically linked to spy satellites in orbit as well as enormous, terrestrially based X-band radars meant to detect and track missile launches (“X-band” is merely a reference to its wavelength, 2.5-4 cm, which is small and therefore more sensitive; most airliners, for example, are equipped with X-band radars to detect turbulence). All of this equipment is then connected to a battle-management command-and-control center with massive computers for superspeed-processing of data, final determination that a launched missile is hostile, and the ability to transmit commands to launch the interceptors. There are problems with every phase of this, so many in fact that charges of faked tests of parts of it have been commonplace. Some people, myself included, suspect that the GMD is simply a cover for long-term research and development plans aimed not at defense on Earth but at the domination of space.³⁸

It is important to remember that the three approaches to interception—boost phase, midcourse, and terminal—are utterly different and each has its own constraints. Any boost-phase interception, no matter how technologically sophisticated, has to originate fairly close to the launch site of the enemy missile to have any chance of success. Our current missile defense sites, for example, are nowhere near close enough to have a hope of intercepting a Chinese launch from its Central Asian province of Xinjiang. Such a Chinese attack could be intercepted only in the midcourse or terminal phases.³⁹ The terminal phase usually lasts only a minute or two and is currently beyond the data-processing capabilities of our computers. That is why the GMD remains the most important option since it offers the greatest chance of success, problematic as even that may be.

Boeing is the GMD’s prime contractor. As of December 17, 2005, the company had built eight interceptors that were placed in silos at Fort Greely, Alaska, and two more at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. These make up the entirety of the known missile defense system deployed by the United States to date. The Missile Defense Agency has announced that it will not release any further information about future emplacements, even though Fort Greely is scheduled ultimately to house forty interceptors. Victoria Samson of the Center for Defense Information believes that this “unwillingness to give specifics about the program is a sure indicator that things are going poorly.”⁴⁰ She may well be right.

The problems of the GMD itself are legion. The interceptor—technically known as an “exoatmospheric kill vehicle” (EKV)—consists of a two-stage booster, followed by a liquid-fuel rocket that steers it on the last leg of its journey. Its speed should be about 13,400 miles per hour at impact. The interceptors are supposed to carry infrared sensors that will help them determine whether a target is a warhead or a decoy, although so far there is no evidence that these work. Other on-board sensors take over from ground guidance at close range, making the rocket, which does not carry a heavy explosive warhead, somewhat maneuverable. It is designed to destroy the target simply by colliding with it.⁴¹

Test failures have revealed numerous problems with the interceptor. On December 15, 2004, a simulated warhead was fired from Kodiak Island, Alaska, south over the Pacific, but its intended interceptor, launched from the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site at the Kwajalein Missile Range in the Marshall Islands, never left its silo. On February 14, 2005, the Missile Defense Agency tried again. This time the interceptor shut down due to a “software error.” These are peculiar failures since the United States has had decades of experience in missile launches.⁴² Keep in mind that the interceptor has yet to be tested with the much more powerful booster rocket designed for it and intended to give it the necessary speed to intercept a real missile. The surrogate rocket used in the Pacific tests does not produce the vibration and stress that will accompany real-world conditions, which threaten to damage the on-board computer, thrusters, antennas for receiving data, optics for navigating, sensors, and a refrigeration unit for cooling the sensors, which are extremely sensitive to heat.⁴³

The most notorious problem with the tests is that, when the interceptors have actually lifted off, they have been artificially guided to their targets by Global Positioning System homing devices and electronic beacons because our new spy satellite and radar systems for detecting and tracking missiles have not yet been built. We do not yet have the means to detect a hostile ballistic missile coming at us, which means that the interceptors sitting in the ground in Alaska are functionally blind. Defense Department veteran Philip Coyle says that for the GMD system to work in its present condition, North Korea would have to give us advance notice of its intention to launch an ICBM and supply the relevant target information. “To be credible,” Coyle writes, “the GBI [ground-based interceptor] must eventually show that it can hit a target with no targeting aids on-board the target re-entry vehicle.”⁴⁴ It has yet to do so.

There are major delays and cost overruns in other vital parts of the GMD system, particularly the not-yet-built new-and-improved surveillance satellites and a huge X-band radar mounted on a seagoing, oil-drilling rig, which is supposed to be moored at Adak, Alaska.⁴⁵ The probably insurmountable problem that faces the whole GMD system, however, is its inability to distinguish between warheads and decoys in flight. Increasingly, it seems that, in the foreseeable future, no amount of science will be able to overcome this difficulty. Any nation or terrorist group capable of building an intercontinental ballistic missile would have no difficulty in adding a few appropriately painted balloon decoys to its payload. If our interceptor missiles cannot tell one from another, the entire effort is a waste of time and money, a point that serious strategists have long understood. In 1986, the renowned Russian physicist and winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, Andrei Sakharov, advised the Soviet government that Reagan’s strategic defense initiative could easily be fooled and/or overwhelmed simply by firing decoys along with Soviet missiles and increasing the number of missiles in any assault. There was no reason, he said, to waste money trying to match an American ABM system.⁴⁶ Twenty years later, nothing has happened that would alter his conclusion in any way.

In the weightlessness of outer space, a decoy cannot be detected simply because of its lighter weight. Some experts believe that the new X-band radars and the sensors mounted on our interceptors will sooner or later be able to detect an infrared signature that would distinguish a warhead from a decoy, but there is no test evidence to support this belief.

Professor Theodore C. Postol of MIT, one of our country’s leading authorities on ballistic missile defenses, has been warning about the problem of decoys for many years. In a now famous June 15, 2002, letter to the Boston Globe, Postol wrote: “The current National Missile Defense interceptor tries to identify warheads and decoys by ‘looking at them’ with infrared eyes. Because the missile defense is essentially using vision to tell which objects are decoys and which are bombs, this technique is no more effective than trying to find suitcase bombs at an airport by studying the shape and color of each suitcase.” He concluded: “The [Missile Defense] agency has no technical program for solving this fundamental problem. It has also been unable to provide any credible scientific evidence or analysis to show that it can ever solve this problem. So what it proposes to do is to classify the fact that the targets it is flying [in tests] have been preconstructed in ways that will allow it to tell one from another. This misuse of the classification system to hide the fact that the National Missile Defense System has no credible scientific chance of working is a serious abuse of our security system.”

The decoy problem is one of the reasons why the Pentagon has begun to invest heavily in a boost-phase intercept. This form of attack—while the incoming rocket and its warhead are still coupled and moving relatively slowly into space—would destroy any decoys before they could separate from the missile, thereby solving that problem. There are at least fifty different proposals for developing boost-phase interceptors, but all of them suffer from a fundamental inability to tell whether a missile just after liftoff is carrying a warhead or is merely launching a satellite. In addition, most forms of boost-phase attack, particularly lasers, would not be able to fully disable the warhead, which will surely be heavily shielded and thermally insulated in order to be able to withstand re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. The danger is that an attack on an ascending rocket will merely knock it off course, causing it to fall back into a neighboring, possibly friendly, country. For example, a missile launched from Iran against Washington, D.C., and attacked in its boost phase would threaten several Middle Eastern countries as well as Turkey and possibly even Europe.⁴⁷ Air force officers and members of the Center for Security Policy do not allow such considerations to worry them, arguing that “collateral damage” may be unavoidable to protect the United States.

There has been a great deal of writing about a space-based boost-phase antimissile laser, but it is at present little more than a concept and would almost surely be too heavy ever to put into orbit. The main research focus for a boost-phase weapon is an airborne laser (ABL). Mounted in the nose of a modified Boeing 747-400F commercial airplane, the ABL’s high-energy laser is expected to be in the megawatt range—more than a million watts. When working properly, the laser would fire a beam of directed energy at the speed of light toward the body of an ascending rocket that might be hundreds of miles from the aircraft, heating its shell until it failed structurally. Whether such a laser would actually produce enough energy is still an open question. The chosen source of directed energy is a chemical oxygen iodine laser that produces energy through the reaction of hydrogen peroxide with chlorine gas. According to Miranda Priebe, a physicist and a research assistant at the Center for Defense Information, “The ABL beam will be generated by several laser modules. When light from these modules is amplified with a resonator (a set of mirrors that must be able to withstand the intense energy of the laser beam), the combined output is a single, powerful beam.”⁴⁸

On December 3, 2004, the prototype ABL aircraft had its first two-hour flight aborted by Missile Defense Agency officials after twenty-two minutes because of a false warning from on-board instruments of an air-pressure problem. Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin share the work with the agency. The ABL’s price is now in the range of $5.1 billion for one fully equipped airplane, twice the original estimate. On March 9, 2005, Lieutenant General Henry Obering, director of the Missile Defense Agency, told the press that the ABL “is not out of the woods yet. I can’t declare that [it is] a totally risk free program.”⁴⁹ His remark was a major understatement.

Leaving aside the fact that putting a high-energy laser aboard an aircraft involves fitting an incredible array of sensors, computers, chemicals, and mirrors into a constricted, dusty, vibrating space, a major problem is weight. The original plan called for fourteen SUV-sized modules working in tandem to generate laser light that would be projected through a telescope mounted in the 747’s nose. However, that idea proved to be impossible, so the number was cut to six modules. Even the six-module system weighs about 180,000 pounds—5,000 pounds more than the original design weight for the fourteen-module scheme—and still puts pressure on the airframe. The Boeing 747-400 freighter, the largest commercial cargo transport in service, can carry a maximum of 248,000 pounds, but this weight has to be distributed throughout the aircraft. The laser consists of six large machines lashed together on the main deck plus chemicals and crew to monitor the laser resonators. In addition, it was discovered on the 2004 test flight that the laser beam ignites dust particles in its path. These produce flickers of visible light called “fireflies,” which weaken the beam’s overall energy. The Missile Defense Agency has decided that the ABL cannot be used at lower altitudes where dust is plentiful, which of course radically reduces the time available for an interception. Similarly, the first flight revealed problems of airframe vibration and atmospheric turbulence that generate what is called “jitter,” which also impedes the laser beam and produces wear and tear on the delicate equipment.

Finally, the heavily laden Boeing 747 lumbers through the sky at a slow speed and is incapable of defending itself. It would thus require fighter aircraft protection in a combat situation, which in turn would necessitate the presence of aerial refueling tankers. It seems likely that any organization adept enough to build an ICBM carrying a weapon of mass destruction could also field a surface-to-air missile, such as the one that, on May 1, 1960, shot down Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 spy plane over Sverdlovsk, Russia, at 70,500 feet.⁵⁰ It is hard to imagine how an ABL lurking within the necessary hundreds of miles of a launch site with a boost-phase interception in mind could be effectively protected, something that will not be lost on an ABL 747’s aircrew.

Terminal-phase interception is not much more promising than the ABL, but at least it is not so esoteric. The chief problem is not detecting the warhead as it re-enters the atmosphere, which is comparatively easy, but designing a missile fast enough to catch it and collide with it in the one or two minutes available. The main weapon the United States proposes to use for this purpose is the Patriot PAC-3 (Patriot Advanced Capability), manufactured by Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control of Dallas, Texas. The PAC-3 is an improved version of the Patriot missiles used during the first war against Iraq in 1991 with such dismal results. (They failed to bring down any Scuds Iraq fired at General Schwarzkopf’s forces or at Israel.) The new one is, however, much faster and without the heavy explosive warhead of its ancestor. PAC-3, however, was never designed for defense against an ICBM warhead but rather for downing shorter-range tactical and cruise missiles. Using a solid propellant rocket motor, the PAC-3 flies at great speed to an intercept point specified by its ground-based fire-solution computer and destroys the target by colliding with it.

According to former assistant secretary of defense Philip Coyle, “Although [the PAC-3] appeared to be doing well in development tests— hitting ten out of eleven targets—those early tests involved the usual artificialities of preplanned intercepts. In more realistic operational tests conducted [in 2002], the PAC-3 hit only three targets out of seven tries, or less than 45 percent.”⁵¹ The main problem with terminal defense is that it can, by definition, protect only a limited area, such as a city. To be effective we would have to deploy innumerable terminal-defense systems all over the country. The deliberate destruction of an atomic weapon over a city or other site might also produce massive nuclear fallout, which could be extremely damaging to the defending country.

By the end of 2004, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld acknowledged that while any planned defense against missile attack would be inadequate, the United States would nonetheless soon have a “modest capacity.”⁵² Two devastating investigations into procurement and testing practices—one by the Missile Defense Agency itself and one conducted by the Government Accountability Office—concluded that the Pentagon had actually sacrificed rigorous testing and quality control in order to meet President Bush’s pledge of a 2004 deployment, and both called for much greater accountability and an end to flagrant cost overruns.⁵³ In October 2005, the Senate Appropriations Committee quietly disclosed that the Pentagon was giving up on trying to make further improvements in its GMD interceptors and that the first generation of ground-based exoatmospheric kill vehicles would also be the last.⁵⁴ Lisbeth Gronlund of the Union of Concerned Scientists reported on the results of this internal criticism: “There is no evidence the GMD system would have any military utility, which is why it has not been declared operational. It is a little-known fact that the Pacific and Strategic military commands, which perform their own assessments separate from those of the MDA, have refused to make it operational.”⁵⁵

In fact, the whole Pentagon effort has been devoted to meeting a non-credible threat from rogue-nation ballistic missiles while ignoring a genuine challenge to the very concept of missile defense—that of Russia and its Topol-M ICBM. As Scott Ritter, a former weapons inspector in the Soviet Union (1988-90) and later in Iraq (1991-98), has observed, “On Christmas Eve 2004, the Russian Strategic Missile Force fired an advanced SS-27 Topol-M road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). This test probably invalidated the entire premise and technology used in the National Missile Defense (NMD) system currently being developed and deployed by the Bush administration.”⁵⁶

The Topol-M was Russia’s original answer to President Reagan’s Star Wars fantasies. It was designed during the late 1980s, but Russia did not produce it immediately because of the collapse of the USSR and because it discovered that Star Wars itself could be rather easily defeated by decoys and large numbers of conventional ICBMs. However, on June 13, 2004, the very day that George W. Bush succeeded in killing off the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, Aleksei Arbatov, one of Russia’s leading experts on military affairs, advocated in parliament that Russia respond by speeding development of the Topol-M. A year and a half later, on December 24, 2005, Colonel General Nikolai Solovtsov, chief of the Strategic Missile Forces, attended a ceremony at the Tatishchevo missile base in the Volga River’s Saratov region. He was commissioning a new set of Topol-Ms, which he declared to be “capable of penetrating any missile defense system.” The Topol-M was first put into service in December 1998 but was deployed only in silos. An off-road mobile version entered combat service in 2006.⁵⁷ It is a truly formidable weapon.

Among its features are high-speed solid-fuel rockets that rapidly lift the missile into the atmosphere and make boost-phase interception inconceivable unless a defense system were located practically next door to the launcher; hardening and reflecting coatings to protect it against laser weapons; up to three independently targetable warheads and four sophisticated decoys; an ability to maneuver to avoid midcourse or terminalphase missile attacks; and a range of over 6,250 miles. There is no known defense against such a weapon. Diplomacy and deterrence are the only means to ensure that it will never be used, and the Bush administration has repeatedly rejected diplomacy as a useful tool of American foreign policy. The conclusion is unavoidable: Washington has given us at best the illusion of protection against a nuclear attack without reducing the odds of such an attack.⁵⁸

There are so many things wrong with the missile defense program that it is difficult to think of it as merely an ambitious scientific effort having start-up problems. From space debris to the inability to identify clearly a hostile launch or sort out the decoys, its failures suggest that if Congress had even a slightly prudent commitment to fiscal integrity, it might well have scuttled the project long ago. That its members did not even discuss the possibility raises disturbing questions. Did the Bush administration and its Republican associates in Congress actually intend to build a missile defense system or were they only interested in a plausible public relations cover for using the defense budget to funnel huge amounts of money to the military-industrial aerospace corporations? As a cash cow, missile defense goes on enriching its sponsors precisely when it is not working and they have to go back to their drawing boards.

America’s imperial project to dominate the space surrounding our planet has provided a nearly perfect setting for official corruption. The air force and the military-industrial complex interests meshing with powerful congressional lobbies that want to bring space-oriented industries to their districts and perpetuate their own safe seats in Congress, as well as unimaginable sums of money protected from public scrutiny by “black budgets,” “special access programs,” and other forms of secrecy, all add up to a prescription for legal thievery on an unprecedented scale. Norman Ornstein, a specialist on Congress at the American Enterprise Institute, has observed that when individual members of Congress have the ability to earmark—that is, privately attach—federal funds for pet projects and slip them unopposed into the Pentagons budget, “You are creating the most fertile environment for corruption imaginable.”⁵⁹

During the first years of the new century, an array of experienced Pentagon and congressional budget officers began sounding the alarm that the purchase of weapons systems is now totally beyond public control—or often even public visibility. Of all the weapons systems, the most expensive and most prone to misuse and abuse has been the whole project to create an intercontinental-ballistic-missile defense system. At $8.8 billion, it was, after all, the largest single weapons request in the fiscal year 2006 defense budget. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington estimated that “black budget” requests for fiscal year 2007 amounted to $30.1 billion, the highest level since 1988 during the Cold War, 75 percent of them going to the air force mostly for space programs and new satellites. William D. Hartung, Frida Berrigan, Michelle Ciarrocca, and Jonathan Wingo of the World Policy Institute have summed up our military ventures in space and space defense as “Pork barrel in the sky.”⁶⁰

The raw monetary figures have been literally astronomic. From Reagan’s 1983 “Star Wars” speech to 2006, depending on which expert you listen to, the United States has spent between $92.5 billion and $130 billion on the basic problem of shooting down an ICBM in flight—and that’s without even once having succeeded in doing so.⁶¹ One comprehensive analysis of the ultimate cost of the entire ballistic missile defense system by its distinctly theoretical date of completion in 2015—and excluding its most expensive and problematic component, a space-based laser—is $1.2 trillion.⁶²

There can be no question that the whole system is surrounded by an environment of corruption that has been much aided and abetted by the way Defense Secretary Rumsfeld vastly increased the Clinton administration’s missile defense spending, moved virtually all missile defense projects into the classified budget, and ended normal reports to Congress concerning failures to meet delivery dates, cost increases, and the actual performance of equipment. He also cut some two thousand auditors from the Defense Contract Audit Agency.⁶³ “The Pentagon’s new approach to missile defense testing is a contractor’s dream and a taxpayer’s nightmare,” writes the World Policy Institute’s Ciarrocca. “Pumping in more money while reducing outside scrutiny is an invitation to corruption and cost-overruns.”⁶⁴

In December 2003, Franklin C. “Chuck” Spinney, a former air force officer and for thirty years a budget analyst in the Pentagon, spoke to journalist Bill Moyers about what he called the “moral sewer on the Potomac.”⁶⁵ Perhaps Spinney’s most important insight is that the primary emotion driving this system is not patriotism, greed, or need, but fear. The attacks of 9/11 unquestionably generated real fear, but continuous air force hyperbole in favor of ultra-high-tech projects, presidential statements tying 9/11 to missile defense, and alarmist claims that our dependence on orbiting satellites leaves us no choice but to defend them militarily all capitalize on prevailing fears and undermine a realistic defense.

President Bush is, in this sense, the fear-monger-in-chief. In a speech to the cadets of The Citadel on December 11, 2001, exactly three months after 9/11, the president said, “The attacks on our nation made it even more clear that we need to build limited and effective defenses against missile attack. (Applause) ... Suppose the Taliban and the terrorists had been able to strike America or important allies with a ballistic missile. Our coalition would have become fragile, the stakes in our war much, much higher. We must protect Americans and our friends against all forms of terror, including the terror that could arrive on a missile.” But neither the Taliban nor the 9/11 terrorists had missiles or the knowledge or industrial base to build one. And there are other, far cheaper, more accessible, and more effective ways to deliver a weapon of mass destruction than by missile. For example, one could be secretly imported in a cargo container on a transport ship, or fired from an offshore vessel using a short-range cruise missile, or constructed domestically as did the bombers of the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building in 1995, or sent as a priority package via FedEx.

But what if some terrorists really had access to an intercontinental missile? Given that we have in continuous orbit the world’s most effective intelligence satellites devoted to tracking missile launches, as soon as we had determined that such a launch was not an error, we would retaliate instantly and catastrophically against whatever nation had allowed a missile to be fired against us. The government’s own experts agree that a long-range ballistic missile is the least likely way a hostile state or terrorist group would choose to deliver a weapon of mass destruction against a U.S. target.

Why then did the Bush administration increase spending on missile defense in fiscal year 2002 by 43 percent? The answer lies in a complex amalgam of neoconservative ideology, the influence of right-wing think tanks, air force desires to protect what it sees as its “turf” while expanding its share of the DoD budget, powerful congressmen devoted to enriching their districts, lobbies of arms manufacturers who supply virtually unlimited funds to re-elect their friends, and the interests of places like Huntsville, Alabama, which has lived off missiles ever since rocket scientist and former Nazi SS major Wernher von Braun arrived there after World War II to lead the U.S. Army’s rocket development team.⁶⁶

Missile defense has almost nothing to do with defense and nothing whatsoever to do with the war on terrorism. ABM weapons may actually prove to be useless against incoming ICBMs, but they might be highly effective offensive weapons against other nations’ satellites, and this is why almost nothing said officially by the administration, the Pentagon, or the Congress on the subject of missile defense can be taken at face value. These dual-use weapons are less likely to be employed for missile defense than as a stealthy way to introduce weapons in outer space with the intent of dominating the globe.

On December 14, 2004, General Lance Lord, head of Air Force Space Command at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, repeated to the press what has become an air force mantra: “The war in space began during Operation Iraqi Freedom.”⁶⁷ This overstatement is based on the claim that, at the outset of our invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein attempted to jam the reception of radio signals from U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites. His men allegedly used six commercially available jammers based on Russian designs and available for purchase on the Internet to try to interfere with our “precision-guided” bombs.⁶⁸ The U.S. military has many uses for the GPS, a system of satellites capable of precisely locating any object or spot on Earth. It is ideal for guiding so-called smart bombs to their targets. Iraq’s handheld jammers turned out to have no influence on the GPS satellites or ground stations and were quickly taken out using GPS-guided munitions. (Jamming instantly reveals the location of the jammer, painting a bull’s-eye on him.) Even if jamming had been successful, the U.S.’s munitions have backup systems, which deliver the bombs only slightly less efficiently to their targets.

“To get big-bucks Congressional funding for space-control schemes,” comments Mike Moore, former editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “a threat to U.S. space assets must be manufactured, and Hussein’s pathetic attempts to jam GPS signals seem to be the best (and only) evidence space warriors can produce to prove’ that space war is already underway. . . . [General Lord’s assertions are] part of a sophisticated public relations campaign waged by the Air Force and Defense Department to persuade the public that space war is here.”⁶⁹

It is certainly true that the Global Positioning System highlights the U.S. military’s remarkable dependence on an array of satellites that orbit the planet, held aloft by the tension between their own speed and Earth’s gravitational pull. They provide our armed forces with intelligence, communications systems of all sorts, computer displays of battlefields in real time, guidance for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) such as the Predator and the Global Hawk and for extremely high altitude manned spy planes such as the U-2. They also provide navigational aids, accurate weather forecasts, and numerous nonmilitary functions. The reliance American forces place on such spy and communications satellites may already constitute a militarization of space but not yet a weaponization of space. Satellites are, in a sense, the opposite of weapons—extremely vulnerable “sitting ducks” following fixed paths around the Earth and an immense boon to all mankind. Their military applications are probably among their least significant uses.

The Global Positioning System (known in the U.S. military as the Navstar GPS) is probably the greatest advance in navigation since the discovery of the compass and the invention of the sextant. It is the general term for at least twenty-four satellites, each circling the Earth twice a day, that are positioned in a “medium Earth orbit” (12,600 to 14,760 miles above the planet). A GPS receiver on a ship, automobile, aircraft, bomb, or a hiker’s handheld navigational device decodes a time signal from four of these satellites, which carry extremely accurate atomic clocks, and then calculates a position based on the different times and distances to the various satellites. As of 2005, the GPS could determine your position at any moment within about sixteen feet (five meters), a steady improvement over the previous fifteen years.⁷⁰ Although created for military use, the GPS is today available to any and all users worldwide, providing strikingly accurate information on position and time in all weather conditions. The GPS has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry in applications, including handheld guidance devices for the blind.

The U.S. military operates over 500,000 GPS receivers, most of them on cruise missiles, precision-guided bombs, and other munitions.⁷¹ It invented the system and launched its first GPS satellite into orbit in February 1978. The cost of maintaining the system is approximately $400 million per year, including replacements for aging satellites. The air force keeps twenty-eight satellites in orbit at all times, four as backups to ones that might fail. Satellites cannot be repaired, have a limited life span, and a failure rate of about two per year. Management of the entire system is in the hands of the Second Space Operations Squadron at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado.

The air force has not always been a good steward of the GPS, which has evolved over time into a global public utility, not just a guidance system for bombs. Until August 31, 1983, GPS was exclusively a U.S. military system. On that date, Soviet fighters shot down a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 that had drifted off its flight plan into Soviet airspace. American authorities realized that if the airliner been equipped with a GPS receiver, it could have avoided its catastrophic navigation error. So the air force slowly began making GPS available for civilian use. Today, many commercial airlines integrate GPS tracking into their TV entertainment systems so that passengers can follow the course of their flight on-screen.

From the beginning, U.S. officials knew that they could not prevent other nations or private users from tuning in to its satellites’ signals, and they feared that sophisticated technicians might be able to adapt the GPS to provide guidance for their own cruise or ballistic missiles. The United States therefore required that commercial GPS receivers have limits on the velocities and altitudes at which GPS would supply positions. Moreover, the air force has never thought of itself as a supplier of public goods but rather as an overlord of the globe. Insisting on making civilian and foreign users of GPS dependent on the United States, it implemented something that it called “selective availability,” which degraded GPS’s accuracy by adding signal errors for civilian users—normally about ten meters horizontally and thirty meters vertically. Only the U.S. military and selected allies received the unadulterated data. The air force also retained the ability to switch off GPS on a regional basis and to jam receivers in a war zone. Needless to say, this dependency on the “goodwill” of the United States irritated a lot of people, who began to devise ways to get around selective availability.

One rather expensive solution came to be known as “differential GPS,” useful primarily for geographic imaging, weather forecasting, mining, agriculture, and high-altitude surveying. Differential GPS involves setting up one GPS receiver—the base station—at a precisely known location. The base station then calculates its position based on GPS satellite signals and compares this location to its known location. The difference is applied to GPS data recorded by roving GPS receivers, thereby correcting the selective availability errors.⁷² But the more definitive answer to selective availability was, of course, a GPS system not run as a U.S. Air Force monopoly.

The Russians already had a primitive version of GPS called Glonas (global navigation system), which as of 2004 had only twelve active satellites and was uncompetitive. On May 1, 2000, the United States unilaterally ended selective availability, magnanimously declaring it to be an American humanitarian gesture: “As part of his ongoing effort to bring the benefits of government investments in science and technology to the civilian and commercial sectors, President Clinton ordered that the intentional degrading of the civilian Global Positioning System (GPS) be discontinued at midnight tonight.”⁷³ Nonetheless, the air force retained all its capabilities to limit service, to turn off GPS regionally, and to jam receivers. Slowly and fitfully, the European Union decided to build an alternative, which it named “Galileo.” This satellite navigation system, when operational, will be more accurate and not subject to shutdown for military purposes. When completed it will be available to all world users, civilian and military, and at its full capacity will require only a Galileo receiver. As Rene Oosterlinck, head of the European Space Agency’s Navigation Department, summed matters up, “Europe cannot accept reliance on a military system which has the possibility of being cut off.”⁷⁴

European nations at first were reluctant to put up the money for Galileo and, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the project almost died. The United States has always recognized that Galileo was intended to break its stranglehold on the use of satellites for navigational purposes, but it did not know what to do about it. The terrorism of 9/11 gave it an opportunity to act. The Bush administration wrote directly to the European Union arguing that Galileo, by ending America’s ability to shut down GPS in times of military operations, would threaten the success of the war on terror. This ploy backfired badly. By mid-2002, virtually all European Union states were on board and had overfunded the project.

Galileo will be a system of thirty spacecraft in orbit—twenty-seven active and three spares—14,514 miles above the Earth. Each satellite has a projected lifetime of twelve years. The system aims at an accuracy of less than a meter, with greater penetration into urban centers, inside buildings, and under trees, a faster fix, and atomic clocks that are ten times better than those on board the GPS satellites. The European Space Agency plans to launch the required thirty satellites between 2006 and 2010, and the system is planned to be up and running under civilian control by 2010.

On December 28, 2005, a Russian Soyuz rocket fired from the old Soviet Cosmodrome at Baikonur, Kazakhstan, carried the first Galileo satellite into orbit—a launch received ecstatically in France, given a hearty “w^rell done” in Britain, and greeted with poorly disguised sour grapes in the United States. As far as the air force is concerned, Galileo has truly slipped the American leash. In September 2003, China joined the project, promising to invest 230 million euros in it. In July 2004, Israel signed on; India joined in September 2005; Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea all affiliated with Galileo during the winter of 2005-6, each of them paying for the privilege. There was speculation that Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Russia also were considering becoming involved.⁷⁵

The air force itself would be wise to start planning a transition to Galileo instead of becoming paranoid over the prospect that many countries around the world may soon meet or exceed American space-based navigational and guidance capabilities. For example, the U.S. military’s precision-guided Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) GBU-31 bomb, which has wreaked so much nonprecision carnage in Iraq, depends on the GPS. Whether it will work with Galileo or whether the European Space Agency will allow such a militaristic use of its satellites is not known. According to the RAND Corporation, “A particularly glaring U.S. space vulnerability is the constellation of Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, thanks to our extraordinary dependence on that system.”⁷⁶

Unfortunately for the United States and the prospects for peace, the Air Force Space Command takes this dependency to mean that we must actively defend the GPS and other military satellites by using antisatellite (ASAT) weapons and other space-war devices. There are ways to prepare for and protect against the inevitability of satellite sabotage or failure, but the use of active military measures surely should not be among them. About the only thing ASATs could do is create so much lethal debris in orbital space as to make it useless for all nations for a very long time, perhaps permanently.

As of December 2005, there were approximately 800 active satellites of every sort in operation—exact numbers are not available since military secrecy hides a significant portion of the total American fleet. According to an estimate by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based private watchdog organization, 413 of these satellites belong to American companies or the United States government. The Russians operate 87, the European Space Agency about 50, and the Chinese 34.⁷⁷ According to the Satellite Industry Association, revenue from both governmental and commercial customers for manufacturers and operators of satellites was $85.1 billion in 2000 and $97.2 billion in 2004, with the United States accounting for more than three-quarters of all spending.⁷⁸ Since 1998, there have been more commercial satellites in orbit than military ones, and the number of commercial launches each year has exceeded military launches. According to the Center for Defense Information, the U.S. military now uses privately owned commercial satellites for about 60 percent of its communications and that “dependence is growing.”⁷⁹

These commercial satellites do many useful things, most of them taken for granted and rarely thought of as related to satellites. Low Earth orbit, just 200 to 500 miles above the Earth’s surface, is crowded with satellites reporting weather conditions, mapping the Earth’s surface (“remote sensing”), sustaining the U.S. Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, and the Hubble Telescope, studying the size of the ozone hole in the atmosphere over Chile, photographing the damage done by the Southeast Asian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina, and transmitting financial and economic news around the world in real time. Satellites in low Earth orbit are so close to the planet, they must travel at very high speeds, usually about 17,000 miles per hour, so that gravity will not pull them back into the Earth’s atmosphere.

Much farther out in space, the world’s major television networks broadcast to their markets from large communications satellites in geosynchronous or geostationary orbits—abbreviated GEO—over the equator. These satellites orbit at the high altitude of 22,237 miles above sea level, where they are far enough from the Earth’s gravitational pull to approximate the speed of Earth itself as it rotates on its own axis in each twenty-four-hour cycle (just over 1,000 miles per hour). This speed is, of course, much slower than the speed at which the Earth travels around the Sun (67,062 miles per hour). Flying at approximately the same speed that the Earth is turning on its axis, the satellite remains in the same position in relation to the Earth even though both are in constant motion.

In 1945, just as World War II was coming to an end but while London was still under attack from Nazi V-2 rockets fired from the Netherlands, the future science-fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke calculated the height and speed required of a satellite to remain in the same place over the Earth. He published his findings in the magazine Wireless World. No one took his idea seriously at the time, but twenty years later, on April 6, 1965, it became a reality with the launching of Intelsat I, also called “Early Bird,” the first commercial geostationary communications satellite. There are today about thirty such communications satellites covering North America and more than a hundred orbiting the planet in different GEO locations. In 2002, the so-called Clarke Orbit, that is, the band where spacecraft can maintain a geosynchronous position with relation to the Earth, held over three hundred satellites of various kinds.⁸⁰ The fifteen U.S. early-warning satellites monitoring missile launches, for example, are almost entirely in GEO, which is quite crowded.⁸¹ When a satellite finally wears out and ceases to function, scrupulous satellite operators have often provided small rockets and enough fuel to move them a few hundred miles higher into a cemetery orbit, but not all operators can or are willing to assume these costs.

One of the biggest communications satellites is the Department of Defense’s Milstar, the size of a city bus, with electricity-generating solar panels as wide as the wingspan of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet. The six Milstars currently in orbit are the most secure of all the various communications satellites. They resist jamming and their electronics are hardened against the electromagnetic pulse that would accompany a nuclear attack.⁸² In addition to being used for direct broadcasting, these communications satellites act as relay stations, bouncing telephone calls, TV images, Internet connections, and other signals from one part of the world to another.

Many satellite functions are quite mundane. As Richard DalBello, former president of the Satellite Industry Association, explains, “When you go to Wal-Mart to buy a pair of sneakers, the credit card goes up to the satellite, gets validated and approved. Then the same satellite tells Wal-Mart that it just sold a pair of sneakers at your neighborhood store, and Wal-Mart adjusts its inventory accordingly.”⁸³ Our dependency on such capabilities can be starkly revealed when they are suddenly withdrawn. On May 19, 1998, the satellite Galaxy IV, owned by PanAmSat, was in geosynchronous orbit above Kansas. At 6:00 p.m. it suffered a failure of its onboard control system as well as all its backup systems and began to roll aimlessly. Some six hundred stations of the National Public Radio system, the CBS network, CNN’s Airport Channel, the Chinese Television Network in Hong Kong, and the Soldiers’ Satellite Network, which brings entertainment programs to the armed forces, were instantly knocked off the air. Many self-service gas stations found themselves unable to accept credit cards. Private business television networks operated by Aetna, Microsoft, 3M, and the Ford Motor Company shut down, as did the Ohio, Minnesota, and Texas state lotteries. Some thirty-five million personal pagers on the East Coast went dead, causing hospitals and obstetricians’ offices to try frantically to reach doctors via telephone for emergency surgeries and unexpected baby deliveries.⁸⁴

No one knows what happened to Galaxy IV—it seems likely that both the primary and backup onboard computers that navigate the spacecraft without ground intervention failed for unknown reasons. Nonetheless, it is air force doctrine that, until proved otherwise, we should assume that Galaxy IV was attacked by an antisatellite weapon operated by an unnamed hostile power.

Major General Daniel Darnell, head of the Air Force Space Command’s Space Warfare Center at Schriever Air Force Base, has exhorted all satellite operators to assume that any disruption to their spacecraft is most likely a hostile strike.⁸⁵ “The first response when something goes wrong,” he warns, “should be ‘think possible attack.’“ Actually, quite a number of events other than deliberate physical or electronic attack can cause a satellite to fail, including natural radiation emanating from galactic space (e.g., cosmic rays or solar storms), collisions with space debris, or technical malfunction.⁸⁶ The problem is that the air force has no way of knowing which of these things may have caused a particular failure. As the Center for Defense Information’s Theresa Hitchens notes, “The Air Force does not have the capability at this time to ascertain on the spot whether any disruption of satellite operations is due to a malfunction, such as faulty software or space weather, or the result of some sort of deliberate interference or attack.”⁸⁷ As usual, however, the military chooses to follow the worst-case scenario most useful for its future funding needs. As Lisbeth Gronlund, codirector of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program, points out, its strategy for space combat is invariably “Fire, Aim, Ready” in that order.⁸⁸

In an effort to “see” what is actually going on in space at any given time, the U.S. Air Force is working on “autonomous proximity operations”—orbital maneuvers that would allow satellites to inspect other satellites, diagnose malfunctions, and perhaps provide on-orbit servicing. The problem is that research in this area is devoted primarily to producing microsatellites, weighing less than one hundred kilograms, and nanosatellites, weighing less than ten kilograms, which the air force disguises to look like space debris and hopes to use to sneak up on other nations’ satellites. These minisatellites would not, however, be on innocent inspection missions. They are designed to surround other satellites and photograph, jam, blind, or collide with them. Microsatellites are inherently dual-use and could function as lethal antisatellite weapons. The main U.S. stealth satellites are in the top-secret Misty series, first put into orbit in 1990, which, by 2005, had reportedly cost us $9.5 billion. Although the air force thought they were undetectable from Earth, the first one was spotted almost at once by amateur space observers in Canada and Europe.⁸⁹

The latest innovation is an experimental microsatellite, XSS-11, that deploys tiny probes to inspect or service spacecraft in distress, according to the carefully worded air force publicity statement. It was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on April 11, 2005. The plan is for the XSS-11 to remain in space for twelve to eighteen months and inspect six or seven spent rocket stages and dead U.S. satellites. Some space watchers have speculated that the XSS-11 is actually testing antisatellite concepts to disable enemy craft.⁹⁰

Jeffrey Lewis of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs reports on two joint British-Chinese experimental microsatellites of fifty kilograms each, whose controllers were able to maneuver within nine meters of a Chinese target satellite. Lewis concludes, “If the Chinese were to conduct a proximity maneuver near a U.S. satellite, the reaction [in the Pentagon] would be apoplectic.”⁹¹ Nonetheless, Theresa Hitchens warns, “There will be a price to pay the first time a U.S. anti-satellite weapon shoots down an innocent Chinese communications satellite because a crucial widget on a U.S. satellite conked out due to faulty manufacturing processes.”⁹²

These problems will only get worse. In order to protect our nation’s and others’ space assets from the air force’s hubris and incompetence, we must relearn how to cooperate with our fellow inhabitants of the planet and take the lead in crafting international agreements on the rules of the road in space, particularly treaties to control weapons in space. We need to agree, for example, that a country’s technical means of observing and verifying what other nations are doing are never appropriate targets of anti-satellite or other kinds of space weapons. We should outlaw all weapons that are designed to destroy other nations’ reconnaissance and surveillance satellites. This was the principle contained in the old Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which we foolishly abandoned in accordance with the recommendations of the 2001 Rumsfeld space commission. The reason is that if one side blinds another, the country that is blinded is almost compelled to conclude that it is being set up for an attack and should therefore use everything it’s got, including nuclear weapons, in retaliation.

The United States has greatly damaged the integrity of international law by refusing to be constrained by its norms, even though no nation needs international law more than we do. International law offers guidelines to acceptable behavior for all nations, rich and poor, and, since violations of the guidelines invite retaliation, it provides deterrence against illegal behavior. The current cluttering of key orbits with debris, for example, reflects a lack of cooperation and our own shortsighted imperialist arrogance. Without any rules on space debris, a poor state with few technical capabilities could decide to blind the United States by the active deployment of space garbage. Such a genuinely “rogue state” could, for instance, detonate a nuclear weapon in space, which is banned by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty but is actively discussed in every military headquarters around the world, particularly since the United States pays so little attention to treaty obligations. Such a detonation would not kill anyone and would not create a worldwide “nuclear winter,” but its electromagnetic pulse would instantly fry the electronics in all orbiting satellites. Even more low-tech, a desperate state could simply send up a few rocket loads of gravel into low Earth orbit.⁹³ The resulting collisions would instantly level the global playing field: no more American smart bombs, no more electronic battlefields, no more global positioning systems, no more secure communications among troops in battle and commanders in rear areas. Instead of obtaining multilateral agreements that would ban such actions, the United States continues to waste its money building space-based antisatellite weapons.

Space weapons are not simply a strategic problem. They are both the cause and the result of several pathological developments in our political and economic system. The iron triangle of the air force, Congress, and the military-industrial complex, sanctified by the high-tech jobs it offers to American workers, is driving our country toward bankruptcy. For some, it is tempting to continue the lucrative practice of buying arcane space technologies that do not work—missile defenses, for example—simply because it keeps people employed. Meanwhile, our democracy is undercut by members of Congress who use the lavish “campaign contributions” they receive—bribes by any other name—to buy elections. The only public business these bought-and-paid-for congressmen attend to is providing a legal veneer for munitions makers’ unquestioned access to the tax revenues of the government. The proper use of a vital human resource— the space we occupy in the universe—is a matter for profound philosophical deliberation. Space has also become, unfortunately, an arena for American hubris and one more piece of evidence that Nemesis is much closer than most of us would care to contemplate.

“What Has ‘Victory’ Achieved?”

Orange lights on the school zone sign beat out their tattoo

Caesar, Julius, 56–57, 59, 62–68, 70, 244, 268

Caligula, emperor of Rome, 69

Cambodia, 3, 19, 94, 96

Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, 77, 79–80, 86

campaign contributions, 242, 259–62

Camp Anaconda (Iraq), 162

Camp Bondsteel (Kosovo), 140, 161

Camp Courtney (Japan), 184, 187–88

Camp Darby (Italy), 154–55

Camp Echo complex, 124

Camp Foster (Japan), 190

Camp Hansen (Japan), 179–80, 189–90

Camp Humphreys (South Korea), 145

Camp Lemonier (Djibouti), 147

Camp Marez (Iraq), 162

Camp Qayyarah (Q-West, Iraq), 162–63

Camp Renegade (Iraq), 162

Camp Salerno (Afghanistan), 124

Camp Schwab (Japan), 194, 204, 206

Camp 6, 124

Camp Speicher (Iraq), 163

Camp Stronghold Freedom (K-2, Uzbekistan), 151–53

Camp Taji (Iraq), 161–62

Camp Victory North (Iraq), 161

Camp Zama (Japan), 202, 204, 206

Canada, 157

Cannae, battle of, 58

capitalism, 164, 272

capital markets, 80–81

Carlucci, Frank, 211

Carr, E. H., 54

Carter, Jimmy, 109, 110, 115, 158, 254

Carthage, 58, 63, 74

Casey, George, 44

Casey, William, 112–13

Cassius, 67–68

Castiglioni, Luis, 168

Castro, Fidel, 96, 102–3, 105, 164

Castro, Juanita, 105

Catholic Church, 112

CBS News, 41–42, 123

CBS TV, 25, 239

Cecil, Robert Gascoyne- (Lord Salisbury), 74

Center for Defense Information, 215, 222, 225, 237, 239

Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, 168

Center for National Security Studies, 249

Center for Responsive Politics, 260

Center for Security Policy (CSP), 211–13, 225

Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 230

Central Asia, 140, 151–53

Central Bank of Iraq, 48, 50

Central Command (Centcom), 15, 51, 61, 76, 158, 160

Central Intelligence Act (1949), 94

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 2–3, 10, 21, 90–136, 212, 246, 249–50

      Afghanistan and, 104, 110–20

      al-Qaeda and, 36–37

      budget of, 115, 275

      Chile and, 2–3, 104–10

      Congress and, 91, 94–95, 250

      covert operations and, 93–94, 102–35

      creation and purpose of, 93–95, 134–35

      extraordinary rendition and, 36, 104, 120–35, 152, 268

      findings, 103–4

      future of, 269

      Iran and, 2, 93

      Iraq and, 95, 98–100

      Italy and, 131

      Japan and, 178

      leaks and, 91, 100–102

      Nicaraguan Contras and, 165

      Pakistan and, 112, 116

      plausible deniability and, 102–4

      president and, 17, 90–93, 95–96, 135–36, 246

      Saudi Arabia and, 112, 118

      torture and, 23–24, 35–37, 40, 120, 258

CIA Counterterrorism Center, 122, 124

Chad, 148

Challenger space shuttle, 217

Chávez, Hugo, 20, 164, 166

Cheney, Dick, 7, 15, 21, 95, 98–99, 101, 168, 193, 246, 249–51, 258

Chicago Tribune, 128, 159

child mortality, 25–29

Chile, 2–3, 19, 94, 104–10, 121, 163, 167, 236, 250

Chilean Army Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), 108–9

Chilean Christian Democratic Party, 105

Chilean Congress, 106, 107

Chilean National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture, 108

China, 8, 14, 54–55, 76, 78, 83–84, 94, 119–20, 116, 157, 198–201, 204–5, 207, 215, 221–22, 236–37, 240, 252, 269–71, 279

Chinese Television Network, 239

Christianity, 4, 55, 70, 76

Christian Science Monitor, 141, 148

Christie, Agatha, 52

Christine, Anthony, 43

Chun Doo-Hwan, 19

Church, Frank, 93, 104, 250

Church Committee, 93–94, 102–5, 250

Ciarrocca, Michelle, 212, 230

Cicero, 56–57, 59–61, 63, 66–68

Cicero (Everitt), 56

citizens, rights of, 59–60, 63

Citizens Against Government Waste, 264

Civilian Conservation Corps, 272, 273

civilians, war and, 8–9, 24–33

“civilizing mission,” 71–72, 75–76

civil liberties, 267

Clarke, Richard A., 34, 99, 120

Clarke Orbit, 238

“clash of civilizations,” 46

class struggle, 62

Claudius, emperor of Rome, 69–70

Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, 68

Clinton, Bill, 34, 96, 99, 119–20, 122–23, 142–43, 181, 194, 210, 213, 215, 220, 235, 248, 255, 275

Clinton v. New York, 258

CNN Airport Channel, 239

Cockburn, Patrick, 31

Cohen, Nick, 137

Cold War, 17, 20, 35, 50, 82, 94, 111, 118, 135, 230, 274–75

Cole, USS, attack on, 123, 125

Coleman, Dan, 121

Coll, Steve, 98, 112–13, 117

collateral damage, 24–33, 121, 225

Colombia, 164–65

Colossus (Ferguson), 80

Comalapa military base (El Salvador), 165

Combatant Status Review Tribunals, 267

“comfort women,” 24, 121

“command responsibility,” 39–40

Commerce Department, 253, 263

Commission on Review of Overseas Military Facility Structure, 137

Commission to Assess United States

      National Security Space Management and Organization (Rumsfeld report of 2001), 213–15, 241

Common Aero Vehicle (CAV), 209

communism, 16, 82, 84, 111, 164

Computer Sciences Corporation, 257

concentration camps, 86

Condor Years, The (Dinges), 108

Congo/Zaire, 3, 19

Congressional Budget Office, 212

Congressional Research Service, 276

Conrad, Joseph, 45, 76, 78

conscience, lack of, 21–22

Constantine, emperor of Rome, 55

Constitutional Convention of 1787, 16. See also U.S. Constitution

consuls, Roman, 61–62, 66

containment, 148, 274

“Contract with America,” 212

Contras. See Iran-Contra; Nicaragua

Contreras, Manuel, 108–9

Convention on the Presence of Foreign

      Forces in the Federal Republic of Germany (1954), 171

Cook, Robin, 14–15, 100

Cooperative Security Locations (CSLs, “lily pads”), 147–48, 153, 155, 164–70

Coors family, 212

Copper Green SAP, 40–41

Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 56

Corona spy satellites, 216

Corriere della Sera (newspaper), 154, 155

corruption, 59, 229–31, 259–68

Council of Europe, 123

Council on Foreign Relations Study Group on Space Weapons, 217–18

Counter-intelligence Field Activity (C1FA), 256–57

counternarcotics flights, 165

“counterspace operations,” 215–16

coups d’état, 20, 106–8, 250

Coyle, Philip, 210, 223, 227

Craig, Larry, 262

Crewdson, John, 128

crime, military bases and, 175–76, 178–93, 198, 206–7

Crisis and Leviathan (Higgs), 277

Cross, Suzanne, 66

cruise missiles, 218, 234

Cuba, 3, 19–20, 94, 96, 102–3, 105, 163. See also Guantanamo Bay

Cuidad del Este (Paraguay), 166–67

Cunningham, Randy “Duke,” 260–61

Curacao military base, 148, 165

current account deficits, 270–71

Curtis, John, 48, 52

Obering, Henry, 225

Observer, 137

Occidental Petroleum Co., 165

Octavian, 66–69

Office of Legal Counsel, 36, 251

Office of National Estimates, 94

Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), 50

Office of Special Plans, 99–100

oil, 6, 46, 51, 142, 147–48, 158, 162, 165–66, 199, 203, 219

oil for food program, 28

Okinawa, 3, 171, 173–74, 177–207

Oklahoma City bombing, 231

Oliphant, Jermaine, 183

Oman, 94, 148, 159

“Omar, Abu” (Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr), 131–34

Omar, Mullah Mohammed, 31, 118

Omdurman, battle of, 79

“1-4-2-1” defense strategy, 143

101st Airborne Division, 42, 162

O’Neill, Tip, 115

On the Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu), 16

Oosterlinck, Rene, 235

Operation Condor, 108, 112

Operation Enduring Freedom, 276

Operation Goldenrod, 121–22

Operation Infinite Justice, 76

Operation Iraqi Freedom, 76, 143, 159, 232

Operation Just Cause, 76

Operation Urgent Fury, 18–19

Opium wars, 77

Opus Dei, 112

Orbital Debris Quarterly News, 219

Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt), 22

Ornstein, Norman, 229

Ota, Masahide, 181–82

Ottoman Empire, 14, 46, 49, 87

Outer Space Treaty (1967), 241

Overseas Basing Commission, 147, 150–51, 158, 160

Ozaki, Hotsumi, 279