http://www.cooperativeresearch.org The Center for Grassroots Oversight aims to provide the public with a means to collaborate on investigations at the grassroots level. en-us http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a070906natoreport#a070906natoreport http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a070906natoreport#a070906natoreport In June 2006, the US, NATO, and Afghanistan's intelligence agency compile a secret report on the Taliban. The report is discussed on July 9 at a private meeting of officials from Western countries and Afghanistan, chaired by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The report goes further than any previous report in describing the Pakistani government's involvement in supporting the Taliban. It states, "ISI operatives reportedly pay a significant number of Taliban living/ operating in both Pakistan and Afghanistan to fight. ... A large number of those fighting are doing so under duress as a result of pressure from the ISI. The insurgency cannot survive without its sanctuary in Pakistan, which provides freedom of movement, communications for command and control, and a secure environment for collaboration with foreign extremist groups. The sanctuary of Pakistan provides a seemingly endless supply of potential new recruits for the insurgency." The report also states that at least four of the Taliban's top leaders are living in Pakistan. But despite the US involvement in creating the report, US diplomacy generally remains in denial about Pakistan's double dealing. President Bush not only fails to successfully pressure Pakistan on the issue, but even continues to praise Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. The report is not leaked to the press at the time. In September 2006, when Pakistan announces a deal with militants in the tribal region of Waziristan, the heart of al-Qaeda's safe haven, Bush publicly supports the deal (see and ). Paul 2008-07-02T22:39:01-07:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a071807niesafehaven#a071807niesafehaven http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a071807niesafehaven#a071807niesafehaven A summary of a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) entitled "The Terrorist Threat to the US Homeland" is declassified. The NIE, a unified assessment from all 16 US intelligence agencies, says that al-Qaeda has, in the words of the Post, "reestablished its central organization, training infrastructure, and lines of global communication over the past two years, putting the United States in a 'heightened threat environment'..." The last NIE on terrorism worldwide was completed in April 2006 and indicated that al-Qaeda's fortunes were declining . The main reason the new NIE gives for al-Qaeda's resurgence is the establishment of a safe haven in Pakistan's tribal region near the Afghanistan border. Its link with the affiliate group Al-Qaeda in Iraq has also helped "energize" militants and aided recruitment and funding. The NIE's release comes just days after a similar report by the National Counterterrorism Center entitled "Al-Qaeda Better Positioned to Strike the West" , and also just days after the Pakistani government broke peace deals with Islamist militants in the tribal region . Edward Gistaro, national intelligence officer for transnational threats and the primary author of the NIE, says in a press briefing, "Over the past 18 to 24 months, safe haven in Pakistan has become more secure." He says it has allowed al-Qaeda to develop of a new tier of leadership in the form of "lieutenants ... coming off the bench," to replace the leaders who have been captured or killed. On the same day the NIE is released, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell says of al-Qaeda, "They're working as hard as they can in positioning trained operatives here in the United States. ... They have recruitment programs to bring recruits into... Pakistan, particularly those that speak the right language, that have the right skills, that have the right base that they could come to the United States, fit into the population... and carry out acts." Paul 2008-07-02T22:38:43-07:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=alate1176rumsfeldteamb#alate1176rumsfeldteamb http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=alate1176rumsfeldteamb#alate1176rumsfeldteamb Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wholeheartedly embraces the "Team B" intelligence analysis of the Soviet nuclear and military threat , regardless of the fact that the team's reports are riddled with errors (see and ). "No doubt exists about the capabilities of the Soviet armed forces," he proclaims after reading the team's final report. "The Soviet Union has been busy. They've been busy in terms of their level of effort; they've been busy in terms of the actual weapons they're producing; they've been busy in terms of expanding production rates; they've been busy in terms of expanding their industrial capacity to produce additional weapons at additional rates." blackmax 2008-07-02T08:36:37-07:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a1176teambversusteama#a1176teambversusteama http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a1176teambversusteama#a1176teambversusteama A team of young, mid-level CIA analysts, informally dubbed "Team A," debates the neoconservative/hardline group of outside "analysts" known as "Team B" over the CIA's estimates of Soviet military threats and intentions. The debate is a disaster for the CIA's group. Team B uses its intellectual firepower and established reputations of members such as Richard Pipes and Paul Nitze to intimidate, overwhelm, and browbeat the younger, more inexperienced CIA analysts. "People like Nitze ate us for lunch," recalls one member of Team A. "It was like putting Walt Whitman High versus the [NFL's] Redskins. I watched poor GS-13s and GS-14s [middle-level analysts with modest experience and little real influence] subjected to ridicule by Pipes and Nitze. They were browbeating the poor analysts." Howard Stoertz, the national intelligence officer who helped coordinate and guide Team A, will say in hindsight, "If I had appreciated the adversarial nature [of Team B], I would have wheeled up different guns." Team A had prepared for a relatively congenial session of comparative analysis and lively discussion; Team B had prepared for war. Neither Stoertz nor anyone else in the CIA appreciated how thoroughly Team B would let ideology and personalities override fact and real data. While CIA analysts are aware of how political considerations can influence the agency's findings, the foundation of everything they do is factual--every conclusion they draw is based on whatever facts they can glean, and they are leery of extrapolating too much from a factual set. Team A is wholly unprepared for B's assault on their reliance on facts, a line of attack the CIA analysts find incomprehensible. "In other words," author Craig Unger will write in 2007, "facts didn't matter." Pipes, the leader of Team B, has argued for years that attempting to accurately assess Soviet military strength is irrelevant. Pipes says that because it is irrefutable that the USSR intends to obliterate the US, the US must immediately begin preparing for an all-out nuclear showdown, regardless of the intelligence or the diplomatic efforts of both sides. Team B is part of that preparation. One example that comes up during the debate is Team B's assertion that the USSR has a top-secret non-acoustic antisubmarine system. While the CIA analysts struggle to point out that absolutely no evidence of this system exists, Team B members conclude that not only does the USSR have such a system, it has probably "deployed some operation non-acoustic systems and will deploy more in the next few years." The absence of evidence merely proves how secretive the Soviets are, they argue. Anne Cahn, who will serve in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Carter administration, later says of this assertion: "They couldn't say that the Soviets had acoustic means of picking up American submarines, because they couldn't find it. So they said, well maybe they have a non-acoustic means of making our submarine fleet vulnerable. But there was no evidence that they had a non-acoustic system. They're saying, 'we can't find evidence that they're doing it the way that everyone thinks they're doing it, so they must be doing it a different way. We don't know what that different way is, but they must be doing it.' ... [The fact that the weapon doesn't exist] doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It just means that we haven't found it yet." Cahn will give another example: "I mean, they looked at radars out in Krasnoyarsk and said, 'This is a laser beam weapon,' when in fact it was nothing of the sort. ... And if you go through most of Team B's specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong. ... I don't believe anything in Team B was really true." Team B also hammers home warnings about how dangerous the Soviets' Backfire bomber is. Later--too late for Team A--the Team B contentions about the Backfire's range and refueling capability are proven to be grossly overestimated; it is later shown that the USSR has less than half the number of Backfires that Team B members loudly assert exist. Team B's assertions of how effectively the Soviets could strike at US missile silos are similarly exaggerated, and based on flawed assessment techniques long rejected by the CIA. The only hard evidence the team produces to back their assertions is the official Soviet training manual, which claims that their air-defense system is fully integrated and functions flawlessly. One befuddling conclusion of Team B concerns the Soviets' ability to continue building new and expensive weapons. While the team acknowledges "that the Soviet Union is in severe decline," paradoxically, its members argue that the threat from the USSR is imminent and will grow ever more so because it is a wealthy country with "a large and expanding Gross National Product." Cahn will say of Team B's arguments: "All of it was fantasy. ... [I]f you go through most of Team B's specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong." The CIA lambasts Team B's report as "complete fiction." CIA director George H. W. Bush says that Team B's approach "lends itself to manipulation for purposes other than estimative accuracy." His successor, Admiral Stansfield Turner, will come to the same conclusion. Former CIA deputy director Ray Cline says Team B had subverted the National Intelligence Estimate on the USSR by employing "a kangaroo court of outside critics all picked from one point of view." Secretary of State Henry Kissinger says that the team's only purpose is to subvert detente and sabotage a new arms limitation treaty between the US and the Soviet Union. blackmax 2008-07-02T08:35:57-07:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a06040574teamb#a06040574teamb http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a06040574teamb#a06040574teamb A group of conservative strategic thinkers and policymakers attends a dinner party in Santa Monica, California. It is at this dinner party that the notorious "Team B" intelligence analysis team will be formed . The cohost of the gathering is Albert Wohlstetter , the eminent neoconservative academic and policy analyst. The next day, the guests join fellow conservative ideologues at a Beverly Hills conference called "Arms Competition and Strategic Doctrine." Wohlstetter uses selectively declassified intelligence data to accuse the Pentagon of systematically underestimating Soviet military might. Wohlstetter will soon publish his arguments in the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy magazine, and Strategic Review. In July, respected Cold War figure Paul Nitze will use Wohlstetter's assertions in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee to accuse Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the CIA of dangerously underestimating both the USSR's military strength and its intentions. Some old-line Cold Warriors--many of whom find themselves in sympathy with the upstart neoconservatives--begin attacking both the CIA's intelligence reporting and the US-Soviet policy of detente. Author Craig Unger will write, "This was the beginning of a thirty-year fight against the national security apparatus in which the [neoconservatives] mastered the art of manipulating intelligence in order to implement hard-line, militaristic policies." blackmax 2008-07-02T08:35:17-07:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a040673deanreadytestify#a040673deanreadytestify http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a040673deanreadytestify#a040673deanreadytestify White House counsel John Dean tells top Nixon aide H. R. Haldeman that he intends to testify about his knowledge of the Watergate conspiracy . Haldeman advises against it, saying, "Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's going to be very hard to get it back in." Dean compiles a list of 15 names of White House and Nixon campaign officials he believes could be indicted for crimes in the Watergate conspiracy (ten of those names are lawyers). He shows the list to fellow Nixon aide John Ehrlichman. blackmax 2008-07-02T08:34:33-07:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=asum72neoconspolicy#asum72neoconspolicy http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=asum72neoconspolicy#asum72neoconspolicy Neoconservatives see Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern's floundering campaign and eventual landslide defeat as emblematic of, in author Craig Unger's words, everything that is wrong with the "defeatist, isolationist policies of the liberals who had captured the Democratic Party." If the neoconservatives had had their way, their favorite senator, Henry "Scoop" Jackson , would have won the nomination. But the Vietnam War has put hawkish Cold Warriors like Jackson in disfavor in the party, and Jackson was set aside for the disastrous McGovern candidacy. The Republicans offer little interest themselves for the neoconservatives. Richard Nixon is enamored of one of their most hated nemeses, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, whose "realpolitik" did nothing to excite their ideological impulses. And under Nixon, the icy Cold War is slowly thawing, with summit meetings, bilateral commissions, and arms limitations agreements continually bridging the gap between the US and the neoconservatives' implacable foe, the Soviet Union. In Nixon's second term, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM)--populated by Democratic neoconservatives like Jackson, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Nixon's domestic adviser), Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ben Wattenberg, and James Woolsey, and joined by 1968 Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey, will pressure Nixon to adopt a tough "peace through strength" policy towards the USSR. Although it will take time, and the formation of countless other organizations with similar memberships and goals, this group of neoconservatives and hawkish hardliners will succeed in marginalizing Congress, demonizing their enemies, and taking over the entire foreign policy apparatus of the US government. blackmax 2008-07-02T08:33:53-07:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a031373deanpayoff#a031373deanpayoff http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a031373deanpayoff#a031373deanpayoff According to his later testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee , White House counsel John Dean talks for the first time to President Nixon about the payment of "hush money" to the seven Watergate defendants (see and ). With Nixon's top aide, H. R. Haldeman, present, Dean, according to his testimony, "told the president that there was no money to pay these individuals to meet their demands. He asked me how much it would cost. I told him that I could only estimate, that it might be as high as a million dollars or more. He told me that that was no problem and he also looked over at Haldeman and repeated the statement. He then asked me who was demanding this money, and I told him it was principally coming from [Watergate burglar E. Howard] Hunt through his attorney." Nixon then reminds Dean that Hunt has been promised executive clemency . Though Nixon will deny any knowledge of either payoffs or executive clemency, if Dean's testimony is true, Nixon could well be guilty of obstruction of justice. The White House will also claim that this topic first comes up on March 21 rather than today . blackmax 2008-07-02T08:33:07-07:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a1972grahamjewishstranglehold#a1972grahamjewishstranglehold http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a1972grahamjewishstranglehold#a1972grahamjewishstranglehold Richard Nixon, his religious adviser Billy Graham, and Nixon's top aide H. R. Haldeman discuss their perceptions of Jewish influence in America. "They're the ones putting out the pornographic stuff," Graham, an influential preacher and televangelist, says. "This [Jewish] stranglehold has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain." Nixon, apparently delighted, asks, "You believe that?" Graham replies, "Yes, sir." Nixon replies: "Oh, boy. So do I. I can't ever say that but I believe it." Graham says: "No, but if you got elected a second time, then we might be able to do something. ... I go and I keep friends with Mr. Rosenthal at the New York Times and people of that sort, you know," referring to Times editor A. M. Rosenthal. "And all--I mean, not all the Jews, but a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine, they swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I'm friendly with Israel. But they don't know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances." Nixon says, "You must not let them know." In 1994, after the publication of Haldeman's diaries first reveals the contents of the anti-Semitic conversation between Nixon and Graham, Graham will say: "Those are not my words. I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms." In 2002, Graham will apologize for his remarks after the tapes of the conversations become public, though Graham will say he has no memory of ever saying such things. blackmax 2008-07-02T08:32:20-07:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a0965wohlstetterrand#a0965wohlstetterrand http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a0965wohlstetterrand#a0965wohlstetterrand Albert Wohlstetter, a professor at the University of Chicago, gathers a cadre of fiery young intellectuals around him, many of whom are working and associating with the magazine publisher Irving Kristol . Wohlstetter's group includes Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Paul Wolfowitz. Wohlstetter, himself a protege of the Machiavellian academic Leo Strauss, is often considered the "intellectual godfather" of modern neoconservatism. Formerly an analyst at the RAND Corporation, Wohlstetter wielded a powerful influence on the US's foreign policy during the heyday of the Cold War. Wohlstetter, who is believed to be one of several analysts who became a model for director Stanley Kubrick's title character in the 1968 film ''Dr. Strangelove,'' added dramatic phrases like "fail-safe" and "second strike" capability to the US nuclear lexicon, and pushed to increase the US's military might over what he saw as the imminent and lethal threat of Soviet nuclear strikes and the USSR's plans for global hegemony. He was such a powerful figure in his hundreds of briefings that he projected far more certainty than his facts actually supported. Though his facts and statistics were often completely wrong, he was so relentless and strident that his ideas gained more credence than they may have warranted. By 1965, he is known in some circles as a "mad genius" who is now collecting and molding young minds to follow in his footsteps. Author Craig Unger writes in 2007, "To join Team Wohlstetter, apparently, one had to embrace unquestioningly his worldviews, which eschewed old-fashioned intelligence as a basis for assessing the enemy's intentions and military capabilities in favor of elaborate statistical models, probabilities, reasoning, systems analysis, and game theory developed at RAND." An analyst with the Federation of Atomic Scientists will write in November 2003: "This methodology exploited to the hilt the iron law of zero margin for error. ... Even a small probability of vulnerability, or a potential future vulnerability, could be presented as a virtual state of emergency." Or as one-time Wohlstetter acolyte Jude Wanninski will later put it, "[I]f you look down the road and see a war with, say, China, twenty years off, go to war now." Unger will observe, "It was a principle his acolytes would pursue for decades to come--with disastrous results." blackmax 2008-07-02T08:31:33-07:00