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The Unique Resource Available to All 2016 Candidates: VIPS
Feb 27, 2016
A Memo to: Dr. Ben Carson, Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, Bernie Sanders, Dr. Jill Stein, and Donald Trump
The media brouhaha over naming your campaign advisers on foreign policy prompts this reminder of a unique resource available, gratis, to all of you. That resource is our nonpartisan group - Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). If we were into self-promotion, we would add to our (virtual) letterhead: "Serving satisfied customers since 2003."
We are about apolitical analysis; we are into spreading unvarnished truth around; we do not shape our analysis toward this or that debating point.
We are about apolitical analysis; we are into spreading unvarnished truth around; we do not shape our analysis toward this or that debating point. Thus, we eschew the moniker "campaign adviser." But that doesn't mean we wouldn't provide apolitical and unvarnished advice to anyone who seeks it.
Unique? We are on the outer edge of atypical in the sense that we are a fiercely nonpartisan, tell-it-like-it-is group of professionals with long experience in intelligence and related fields and with no policy or personal axes to grind. We are Republicans, Democrats and Independents. Abundant proof that party preference plays no role in our analysis can be seen in our enviable record - in the substantive work we have produced over the past 13 years - both before and after the ill-advised attack on Iraq in March 2003.
Also distinguishing us from "campaign advisers," none of us in VIPS lust for a high position in a new administration; none are heavily invested in arms industries; none of us ask for a retainer. In other words, there are no strings attached to the substantive analysis we provide to all our readers and listeners. If objective, disinterested analysis is your cup of tea, we suggest that you check out VIPS's record, to include the multiple warnings we gave President George W. Bush in the months before the attack on Iraq.
In fact, VIPS was founded by a handful of former CIA analysts, including me, for the express purpose of warning President Bush that his small coterie of advisers, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, was adducing fraudulent - not mistaken - "intelligence" in promoting the concept the war on Iraq.
Indeed, in recent years VIPS has been accused of naivete in failing to understand that Bush, to whom we addressed most of our pre-war memos, was fully aware of how Cheney and his cunning co-conspirators and conmen were fabricating the false pretenses for war. We plead guilty to believing that U.S. presidents deserve unspun analysis and to trusting that honest assessments will help presidents act responsibly on behalf of the nation.
Call us old-fashioned, but we just found it hard to believe that any U.S. president would justify war on "evidence" made out of whole cloth. Equally difficult to believe was that our former colleagues would acquiesce in the deception.
So, despite the doubts that Bush really wanted the real story, we rose to the occasion, nonetheless, and issued three corporate VIPS memoranda before the attack on Iraq: (1) "Today's Speech By Secretary Powell At the UN," February 5, 2003; (2) "Cooking Intelligence for War in Iraq," March 12, 2003; and (3) "Forgery, Hyperbole, Half-Truth: A Problem," March 18, 2003.
Our commentary on Secretary of State Colin Powell's UN speech went out on the AFP wire and was widely read - abroad. Foreign media followed up with us; U.S. media - not so much. (This is the primary reason you may be learning all this for the first time).
During that critical pre-war period we took pains to use whatever entree we had to influential people. For example, I personally sought to reach then-Sen. Hillary Clinton via a key person on her staff, who assured me that the senator was being given our op-eds and our analyses to read.
In our memorandum of Feb. 5, 2003, we told President Bush we could give Powell "only a C-minus in providing context and perspective." As for input from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, we told the President: "Your Pentagon advisers draw a connection between war and terrorism, but for the wrong reasons. The connection takes on much more reality in a post-U.S. invasion scenario. [Emphasis in the original]
"Indeed, it is our view that an invasion of Iraq would ensure overflowing recruitment centers for terrorists into the indefinite future. Far from eliminating the threat it would enhance it exponentially."
Though it went unheeded 13 years ago, the final paragraph of VIPS's first Memorandum for the President seems quite relevant to the current discussion regarding "campaign advisers" on foreign policy. In our same-day memo to the President on Powell's UN speech we noted that he had described what he said as "irrefutable and undeniable." Our final paragraph started with an allusion to those words:
"No one has a corner on the truth; nor do we harbor illusions that our analysis is irrefutable or undeniable. But after watching Secretary Powell today, we are convinced that you would be well served if you widened the discussion beyond ... those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic."
Our work reflects the ethos that earlier guided the work of intelligence community analysts at CIA and elsewhere, a commitment to both objectivity and scholarship.
Our VIPS memorandum of Feb. 5, 2003, was sent to the President more than two years before the London Times published the minutes of a July 23, 2002 briefing at 10 Downing Street, during which Richard Dearlove, the head of British intelligence, reported to British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Dearlove's talks three days earlier with his U.S. counterpart, CIA Director George Tenet, at CIA headquarters. According to those undisputed minutes, Dearlove said the following:
"Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." [Emphasis added]
Our warnings to President Bush also came more than five years before the completion of a five-year investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee on pre-war intelligence, the results of which were approved by a bipartisan majority. On June 5, 2008, the date of its release, committee chair Jay Rockefeller commented on its findings:
"In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed."
Just So You Know
One presidential candidate is said to have "an army of several hundred, perhaps even more than a thousand, foreign policy advisers;" another has been criticized for having no "talent pool" of "trusted experts." Little is known about those advising other candidates or, for example, in which campaign headquarters erstwhile advisers to dropout candidates like Jeb Bush are now hanging their hats.
The purpose of this open letter is merely to ensure that you know that you are welcome to dip into a different and unique "talent pool" - Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). This pool is now several hundred years deep in collective experience and brimming with the kind of knowledge that flows from senior-level work in intelligence and related fields. Our record of memoranda, averaging three per year, speaks for itself.
If nonpartisan, fact-based analysis is your cup of tea, have a look at those memoranda, which we believe are second to none in terms of candor and tell-it-like-it-is analysis. Our work reflects the ethos that earlier guided the work of intelligence community analysts at CIA and elsewhere, a commitment to both objectivity and scholarship.
That was before Director Tenet decided to welcome frequent visits by Vice President Dick Cheney to make sure CIA analysts were finding or fabricating enough "intelligence" to "justify" the launch of an unnecessary war. We take no pleasure in having been correct at the outset, in predicting "the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic."
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Katrina's Message on America's Poor Still Unheard
Aug 26, 2015
There was a fleeting moment in the aftermath of the Katrina debacle, August 29, 2005, when the message that there are a lot of poor in New Orleans and America who are routinely ignored, neglected, and reviled had gotten through. In that very fleeting moment, there was a torrent of new studies and reports that flowed out on poverty in America, especially black poverty. Legions of state and local officials made flowery references to the plight of the poor. This was all accompanied by candid media shots of and even interviews with families trapped in dire poverty. Then, President Bush even upped the federal ante on spending on relief and reconstruction in New Orleans.
That was a decade ago. That fleeting moment when the plight of the poor grabbed the national spotlight was just that, very fleeting. Five months before the decade remembrance of Katrina, The Data Center, a New Orleans-based research organization, issued a report that told just how fleeting that moment that paid attention to poverty was. It found that not only were just as many children living in poverty in New Orleans today as at the time of Katrina but that the percentage in poverty was nearly 20 percent higher than the national average. This is despite the sharp drop in the city's population and child population.
In 2005, the desperate scenes of families scrounging for food, clothing items and other necessities in the aftermath of Katrina rammed home the painful message that rampant poverty in New Orleans was a hard fact of life for thousands. Those scenes finally forced policymakers and much of the media to acknowledge that brutal fact. It also forced the even more painful admission that of then nearly one out of three New Orleans residents who lived below the poverty level, the majority of who were black.
It also forced one more painful admission and that was that New Orleans was not an aberration. According to Census figures then, blacks remained at the bottom of the economic totem pole. They had the lowest median income of any group. Bush was widely and rightly blamed for initially dithering, delaying and even denying the extent of the Katrina crisis. He took much-deserved heat that his war and economic policies did much to further fuel the crisis. His tax cuts redistributed billions to the rich and corporations. The Iraq war drained billions from cash-starved job training, health, and education programs. Corporate downsizing, outsourcing, and industrial flight further fueled America's poverty crisis. This all happened on Bush's watch.
But a seemingly indifferent and clueless Bush was not the sole culprit. Even during the Clinton era economic boom, the unemployment rate for young black males was double, and in some parts of the country, triple that of white males.
During those years, state and federal cutbacks in job training and skills programs, the brutal competition for low and semi-skilled service and retail jobs from immigrants, and the refusal of many employers to hire those with criminal records have further hammered black communities and added to the Great Depression era high unemployment numbers among young blacks. The tale of poverty was more evident in the nearly one million blacks behind bars, the HIV/AIDS rampage in black communities, the sea of black homeless persons, and the raging drug and gang violence that ripped apart many black communities.
Then there are the children. One-third of America's poor are children. The Children's Defense Fund, in its periodic reports, routinely finds that nearly 1 million black children live not in poverty but in extreme poverty.
Bush's exit from the White House in 2009 didn't change things for the poor. The poverty numbers have steadily risen for during the decade after Katrina. There has been no sign of a turnaround. For that to happen, there would have to be a massive commitment of funds to job, training and education programs, and greater tax incentives for businesses to train and hire the poor. That will take an even greater active national lobbying effort by Congressional Democrats, civil rights, and anti-poverty groups. Unfortunately, the poor have been too nameless, faceless, and vast in numbers to target with a sustained lobbying campaign.
President Obama's initiatives on raising the minimum wage, expansion of health care, and job creation, and small business development, have been welcome and much needed. But these initiatives have been fought tooth and nail by an obstructionist GOP. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has gone much further and put forth solid proposals that frontally challenge wealth and income inequality in the nation. But other than Sanders and the passing references that Obama and Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton made to the gaping inequality, there is still no national will to plop the plight of the poor squarely on the nation's policy table.
There's not much sign that this will change. In a hotly contested presidential election year, the pack of GOP presidential candidates will claw to outdo each other to paint any initiatives by Democrats to ramp up spending on job, health and education programs as wasteful, and self-defeating. And millions will believe them. This assures that a decade after Katrina the message that millions in New Orleans and America grow poorer, more desperate, and greater in number, will remain unheard.
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A Decade After Iraq War Began, We Should Make Amends
Mar 19, 2013
I was born in Iraq, and in 2003, I was in Baghdad. My family and I spent the first weeks of March preparing for the U.S.-led invasion. I was in charge of storing gas for the generator, placing tape across windows, and hiring a contractor to dig a well in our backyard.
As we feared, President Bush launched his war of choice on March 20. We survived, but we were among the lucky ones.
Millions of Iraqis have been killed, injured or displaced. One of the most developed countries in the region at the time of the invasion, Iraq now is among the worst in terms of infrastructure and public services. Baghdad ranks lowest in the quality of life of any city in the world, according to a recent global survey from the consultant group Mercer.
Moreover, the Iraqi national identity has been replaced by ethnic and sectarian affiliations.
I am half Sunni and half Shiite -- or "Sushi," as Iraqis jokingly call kids of mixed marriages. I was never asked my sect before 2003. I did not know who from my friends was a Sunni or a Shiite until then. But now, these sectarian divisions have become a core component of Iraq's new identity, and they continue to threaten its territorial integrity and national unity.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq took a heavy toll on the United States, as well.
America must apologize to Iraq, pay for what it broke and hold the individuals behind the war accountable.
Almost 4,500 young American men and women were killed, some 32,000 were injured, and hundreds of thousands came back home with psychological trauma. According to Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes, U.S. taxpayers will end up spending $3 trillion on the Iraq invasion, occupation, and care for returning soldiers.
The Iraq fiasco also damaged America's credibility and reputation around the world.
Bush and his senior aides, supported by pundits, sold the American people a lemon. Americans were told Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and the U.S. invasion would save the world from imminent danger. Americans were also promised a clean and swift operation that would liberate Iraq and be welcomed by Iraqis.
None of that happened.
Yet, after all this, no apology has been given to Iraqis, no politicians have been prosecuted, no pundits have been held responsible, and no compensation has been given to Iraq.
If you don't support the idea of compensating Iraq, consider this: Kuwait has been receiving compensation from a country that illegally and immorally invaded it in 1990. That country, believe it or not, is Iraq.
Ten years after Bush waged this senseless war, I am now a U.S. citizen and homeowner in Washington, D.C., where my first child was born a few weeks ago.
More than ever, I am eager to turn over a new leaf in U.S.-Iraqi relations. But for that to happen, we can't just sweep the war under the rug.
America must apologize to Iraq, pay for what it broke and hold the individuals behind the war accountable.
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