We Americans harbor a quaint belief that a new president takes charge of a government that eagerly awaits his next command. Like an orchestra conductor or perhaps a football coach, he can inspire or bludgeon and get what he wants. But that’s not how things work at the top, especially where “national security” is concerned. The Pentagon and CIA are powerful and independent fiefdoms characterized by entrenched agendas and constant intrigue. They are full of lifers, who see an elected president largely as an annoyance, and have ways of dealing with those who won’t come to heel.

Compound that with the Bush-Cheney administration’s aggressive seeding of its staunch loyalists throughout the bureaucracy, and you have a pretty tough situation. Obama, then, has to contend not only with the big donors and corporate lobbies. His biggest problem resides right inside his “team.”

The internal battles between American presidents and their national security establishments are not much reported. But if it is an invisible game, it is also a devious and even deadly one. Our civilian leaders end up mirroring the chronically nervous chiefs of state of the fragile democracies to our south.

Those who do not kowtow to the spies and generals have had a bumpy ride. FDR and Truman both faced insubordination. Dwight Eisenhower, who had served as chief of staff of the US Army, left the White House warning darkly about the “military industrial complex.” (He of all presidents had reasons to know.) John Kennedy was repeatedly countermanded and double-crossed by his own supposed subordinates. The Joint Chiefs baited him; Allen Dulles despised him (more so after JFK fired him over the Bay of Pigs fiasco), and Henry Cabot Lodge, his ambassador to South Vietnam, deliberately undermined Kennedy’s agenda. Kennedy called the trigger-happy generals “mad” and spoke angrily to aides of “scattering the CIA to the wind.” The evidence is growing that he suffered the consequences.

In the 1950s, the late Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, a high-ranking Pentagon official, was assigned by CIA Director Allen Dulles to help place Dulles’s officers under military cover throughout the federal government. As a result, Dulles not only knew what was happening before the president did, but had essentially infiltrated every corner of the president’s domain. One Nixon-era Republican Party official told me that in the early 1970s, there were intelligence officers everywhere, including the White House. Nixon was unaware of the true background of many of his trusted aides, particularly those who helped drive him from office. Remember Alexander Butterfield, the so-called “military liaison,” who told Congress about the White House taping system? Years later, Butterfield admitted to CIA connections.

In December 1971, Nixon learned of a military spy ring, the so-called Moorer-Radford operation, that was piping White House documents back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Chiefs were wary of secret negotiations the president and Henry Kissinger were conducting with America’s enemies, including North Vietnam, China and the USSR, and decided to keep tabs on this intrusion upon their domain. Jimmy Carter came into office as revelations of CIA abuses made headlines. He tried to dismantle the agency’s dirty tricks office, but wound up instead a victim of it — and a one-term president.

Those who avoided problems — Johnson, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Jr. — were chief executives that made no problems for the Pentagon and intelligence chiefs. All embraced military and covert operations, expanded wars or launched their own. The agile Bill Clinton was a special case — no babe in the woods, he focused on domestic gains and pretty much steered clear of the hornets’ nest.

As for the Bushes, their ascension represented a seizure of power by the national security state itself. Their family had profited from arms manufacturing for decades. The patriarch, Prescott Bush, monitored US assassination plots against foreign leaders as a senator; and records indicate that the elder George Bush had been a secret agency operative for decades before he became CIA director — and then, 12 years later, president.

Obama seems to understand his narrow range of movement, and to be carefully picking his fights. He retained many of Bush’s top military brass, and even Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who himself had served as a CIA director for Bush’s father. He has trod very carefully with the spy agency and has declined to aggressively investigate Bush administration wrongdoing on torture and wiretapping. Obama’s campaign rhetoric about disengaging from Iraq seems a long time ago, and the war in Afghanistan is taking on the hues of permanency.

The old boys’ network is very much in place, and it is hard at work to force Obama’s hand, a la Vietnam. Witness the leaking of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s supposedly “confidential report” calling for escalation in Afghanistan. The leak was, not surprisingly, to the reliable Bob Woodward. The reporter was himself in Naval Intelligence shortly before he went to work at the Washington Post, where he soon built a career around leaks from the military and spy establishment. The White House was furious at the McChrystal release. But what could it do? Presidents come and go, and the security folks have ways to hasten the latter.

Covert alliances and payments to corrupt foreign allies continue, making creative diplomacy more difficult. In late October came a front-page story that the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, suspected of being a major figure in that country’s opium trade, has been on the CIA’s payroll for eight years. Anyone who finds this shocking should go back and read about the CIA and the drug trade in Southeast Asia.

Throughout its six-decade history, the CIA has resisted accountability, with even some of its own nonspook directors kept in the dark about the agency’s most troubling activities. As for the public’s elected representatives, Nancy Pelosi is the most recent in a long line of legislators to accuse the CIA of deliberately misleading Congressional overseers.

None of this is likely to change soon, and not without a huge fight. Half a century after Ike’s famous admonition, conflict and intrigue remain the engine of our economy, and everyone from private equity firms to missile makers to car and truck manufacturers count on that to continue. The homeland security industry, the most recent head to grow on this hydra, is now seeking permanency.

So Barack Obama is boxed in. But so are the American people, and so, really, is democracy itself. Bringing this inconvenient truth out in the open is the essential first step toward taking back control of our government — and our future. For all the reasons laid out here, Obama will need help. He may, in the rote formulation, hold “the most powerful office in the world.” However, the extent to which he controls the government he heads, is another matter.

Large batches of e-mail records from the Justice Department lawyers who worked on the 2002 legal opinions justifying the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation techniques are missing, and the Justice Department told lawmakers Friday that it would try to trace the disappearance. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who leads the panel, angrily demanded to know what had happened to the e-mail files, and he noted that the destruction of government records, including official e-mail messages, was a criminal offense.

The disappearance of harmful documentation and related amnesia is a leitmotif of the George W. Bush administration, but also of his father’s political career. Just to remind of a few instances:

-Under George W. Bush, the CIA destroyed tapes of its officers engaged in activities tantamount to torture.

-Email records of Karl Rove and his associates went missing-emails that might have shed light on improper political pressures applied to US Attorneys. (The Obama Administration says it will try to recover some of them from a specific time period, though others are lost and gone for good.)

-Many of George W. Bush’s military records are missing; the accidental destruction of microfilm, a fire at a records facility and other mishaps were blamed.

-Bush’s father has at various points in his career claimed not to remember where he was or not to remember participating in crucial meetings at which illegal activities were discussed-such as the diversion of weapons for an unauthorized war in Nicaragua. (See my book, Family of Secrets, for more on the father in this regard.)

The government and media exhibited great zeal in examining tempests involving Bill Clinton-from purported misuse of the White House travel office to an unprofitable land deal called Whitewater to the consensual if tawdry affair involving Monica Lewinsky. Surely, by comparison or on its own merits, the ongoing suppression of documentation pertaining to massive tampering with the overarching democratic mechanism warrants a thorough and muscular inquiry.

In an article on Foreign Policy’s website by Jeff Stein-an article which should merit wide attention but does not seem to have gotten it-we learn that:

John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn’t know what he was talking about. Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency’s intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito  in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water. “From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.” …

… [T]he pro-torture camp was quick to pick up on Kiriakou’s claim. “It works, is the bottom line,” conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh exclaimed on his radio show the day after Kiriakou’s ABC interview. “Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works.” A cascade of similar acclamations followed, muffling — to this day — the later revelation that Zubaydah had in fact been waterboarded at least 83 times.

….Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror… Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up. “What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts,” he writes. “I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence.”

But never mind, he says now. “I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”… “Now we know,” Kiriakou goes on, “that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied.” …Kiriakou… claims that the disinformation he helped spread was a CIA dirty trick: “In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own.”

Given the enormous amount of ink and airtime devoted to Kiriakou’s original-and wildly and damagingly wrong-original claim, the corrective would be to provide heavy coverage to his retraction. Thus far, that has not happened.

It’s hard to talk about the dangers of cell-phone radiation without sounding like a conspiracy theorist. This is especially true in the United States, where non-industry-funded studies are rare, where legislation protecting the wireless industry from legal challenges has long been in place, and where our lives have been so thoroughly integrated with wireless technology that to suggest it might be a problem-maybe, eventually, a very big public-health problem-is like saying our shoes might be killing us. Except our shoes don’t send microwaves directly into our brains. And cell phones do-a fact that has increasingly alarmed the rest of the world….

 Though the scientific debate is heated and far from resolved, there are multiple reports, mostly out of Europe’s premier research institutions, of cell-phone and PDA use being linked to “brain aging,” brain damage, early-onset Alz­heimer’s, senility, DNA damage, and even sperm die-offs (many men, after all, keep their cell phones in their pants pockets or attached at the hip). In September 2007, the European Union’s environmental watchdog, the European Environment Agency, warned that cell-phone technology “could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking, and lead in petrol.”

Perhaps most worrisome, though, are the preliminary results of the multinational Interphone study sponsored by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, in Lyon, France. (Scientists from thirteen countries took part in the study, the United States conspicuously not among them.) Interphone researchers reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell-phone use, the chance of getting a brain tumor-specifically on the side of the head where you use the phone-goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Interphone researchers in Israel have found that cell phones can cause tumors of the parotid gland (the salivary gland in the cheek), and an independent study in Sweden last year concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. Another Interphone study reported a nearly 300 percent increased risk of acoustic neuroma, a tumor of the acoustic nerve.

You may have heard bits and pieces of this, but Ketcham brings more of it together in a more persuasive manner than I’ve seen before. Time to discuss.

We can better understand the recantation process by watching this vintage video. It depicts a psychological test proving how people can be made to change their assertions based on subtle peer pressure: (thanks to Brasscheck TV for bringing this to my attention)

Watch On Youtube

Mr. Blankfein, your firm [Goldman Sachs], and others, created and sold bundles of mortgages known as collateralized debt obligations that it simultaneously sold short, or bet against. These C.D.O.’s turned out to be bad investments for the people who bought them, but your short bets paid off for Goldman Sachs. In the process of selling them to institutional investors, however, your firm lobbied ratings agencies to assign them high ratings as solid bets - even as your firm planned on shorting them. Could you explain how Goldman bet against these C.D.O.’s while simultaneously trying to persuade ratings agencies and investors that they were good investments?…should we continue to allow transactions in which you’re betting against what you’re also selling?…

This one is for the entire group. All of your firms are involved in some form of proprietary trading, or using your own capital to make financial bets, not unlike hedge funds and other private investors. As the recent crisis has shown, these bets can go catastrophically wrong and endanger the global financial system. Given that the government sent a clear signal in the crisis that it would not let the biggest firms fail, why should taxpayers guarantee this sort of trading? Why should the government backstop what amounts to giant hedge funds inside the walls of your firms? How is such trading helpful to the broader financial system?….

Again, for the group: Over the last year, your firms have actively used the Federal Reserve’s discount window to exchange various investments (including C.D.O.’s) for cash. You probably have a better idea than most about what those assets now sitting on the Fed’s balance sheet are worth. Given the growing calls for regular audits of the Fed (an idea being resisted by the likes of the chairman, Ben Bernanke), do you think the demands for such audits are warranted?…

This question is for Mr. Mack [John Mack of Morgan Stanley]. In November, in a surprisingly candid moment, you publicly declared, “Regulators have to be much more involved.” You then added, “We cannot control ourselves.” Can you elaborate on those comments? Is Wall Street inherently incapable of policing itself - a view contrary to what most of your peers have argued?….

Mr. Blankfein. Your firm, like other banks on this panel, was paid in full by the American International Group on various financial contracts, thanks to the government’s bailout. You can understand how this has whipped up no small amount of fury and questions over why A.I.G. and the government did not try to renegotiate those contracts. Because your firm was the largest beneficiary of the government’s decision, did you or any of your employees lobby the Fed, Treasury or any other government agency for this “100 cents on a dollar” payout? If so, enlighten us about those conversations….

It’s a safe bet, based on past such inquiries, that the commission will not unearth the full dimensions of the problem, nor propose sufficiently bold solutions. And if it does, it is likely to be ignored. Journalism itself is far better equipped to get to the bottom of things-and to stay on the case until meaningful changes come to pass. Here at WhoWhatWhy, as we ramp up into a full-blown investigative news organization, we’re eager to get onto this particular trail.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
TUESDAY, JANUARY 5, 2009
CONTACT: Jenn Ettinger at (202) 955-5665
 
POLICY EXPERTS CALL ON WASHINGTON POST TO STOP PRINTING BIASED “NEWS” ARTICLES BY BILLIONAIRE IDEOLOGUE, PETER G. PETERSON
 
Post Runs “News” Story by Peterson-Funded Fiscal Times About Conrad Deficit Commission,
Controversial Idea Promoted by Peterson — Quoting Groups Funded by Peterson.
Group Asks to Meet with Washington Post Company Chair Donald Graham.
 
WASHINGTON — The Washington Post ‘s decision to publish special-interest-funded propaganda as a “news” story on New Year’s Eve could signal the death of the daily newspaper as an independent and objective news source, according to a group of 21 policy experts who protested in a Jan. 1 letter to the Post’s ombudsman. Having received no response, the group sent a new letter to The Washington Post Company chairman Donald Graham today demanding to meet with him. Campaign for America’s Future co-director Roger Hickey signed both letters.
 
The Washington Post Dec. 31 article, entitled “Support grows for tackling nation’s debt,” wasn’t written by the newspaper’s reporters. It was written by a new organization called The Fiscal Times, whose founder and major backer, Peter G. Peterson, has a long-term ideological commitment to cutting public programs like Social Security and Medicare over public investment and progressive taxation as a way to reduce deficits. This explains why the article was rife with factual errors, important omissions and significant distortions that favored Peterson’s position.
 
Pointing to growing concern about The Washington Post’s partnership with Peterson’s enterprise, the scholars and advocates today requested a meeting with Graham to discuss their concerns in person. In addition to Hickey, signatories for the letter include former Alan Greenspan Commission aide and author Nancy Altman, Syracuse University professor Eric Kingson, Center for Economic and Policy Research co-director Dean Baker and The American Prospect co-founder Robert Kuttner.
 
Several scholars and advocates sent their original letter of protest to Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander on New Year’s Day, arguing that the Post should not publish news content financed by people like Peterson, who has an interest in the coverage. They specifically pointed to the fact that The Fiscal Times article covers Sen. Kent Conrad’s, D-N.D., controversial plan for a deficit commission, which Peterson publicly favors, and quotes advocates backed by Peterson while ignoring critics of the deficit commission idea, like a coalition of 40 national organizations whose opposition to the commission is nowhere to be found in the article.
 
The original letter called on The Washington Post to “rescind the partnership” and to “reserve opinion pieces for the op-ed page, and not allow itself to be a propaganda arm for ideologues who use fiscal distress as a stalking horse to destroy social insurance.”
 
Responding to another “pay-to-influence” coverage scandal at The Washington Post, Alexander admitted last summer that his publisher’s “ill-fated plan to sell sponsorships of off-the-record ‘salons’ was an ethical lapse of monumental proportions.” Post executives apologized too, rescinding plans for a series of intimate dinners to discuss public policy issues where fees of up to $25,000 guaranteed underwriters a seat at the table with lawmakers, administration officials and opinion leaders.
 
Several media organizations and blogs covered the Peterson content controversy over the New Year’s weekend. News coverage by Politico and reform websites like Media Matters’ assure the issue won’t go away for The Washington Post. Protesting groups were alerted last week by blog posts by Baker, in his “Beat the Press” blog at The American Prospect, and Hickey, writing in The Huffington Post and other websites.

There’s an update on the story from the competition—the New York Times.

This is a Beta site awaiting public funding so it can go daily. If you like what you see here, if you appreciate the kind of serious journalistic exploration of “deep politics” exemplified by WhoWhatWhy founder Russ Baker’s book “Family of Secrets,” please consider becoming a sustainer of our organization. CLICK HERE to get the truth out—and start on the road to a more candid and politically healthy America.

Like about a dozen other states, Florida is debating a proposed amendment to its state constitution that would try to block, at least symbolically, much of the proposed federal health care overhaul on the grounds that it tramples individual liberty. But what unites the proposal’s legislative backers is more than ideology. Its 42 co-sponsors, all Republicans, were almost all recipients of outsized campaign contributions from major health care interests… It is just one example of how insurance companies, hospitals and other health care interests have been positioning themselves in statehouses around the country to influence the outcome of the proposed health care overhaul.

The Times mentions that the person behind this strategy is Clint Bolick of the Goldwater Institute in Arizona. If you want to know more about Bolick and those who share his views, check out http://www.ij.org/index .  Describing themselves as libertarian lawyers who love free enterprise and “rugged individualism”, they nevertheless end up advancing the interests of big companies that often do serious harm to the interests of small businesses that are the backbone of the market economy. To say nothing of the interests of ordinary people who would like nothing more than a fair shake – a pension that doesn’t vanish, some medical coverage that won’t take flight when they get really sick.

How willing is Clint Bolick himself to let the free market prevail? One way to find out is to peruse the Amazon reviews for Bolick’s novel, NIcki’s Girl:

“I don’t typically read this type of genre, but this page-turner even lured me in to this psychological thriller. Clint Bolick makes his pages dance with vivid dialogue and a seemingly good ending to an otherwise tragic tale.”  Who wrote this? “S. Bolick, Phoenix, AZ”.

“Like most avid readers, I have my favorite authors and have just added Clint to the top of that list.  What a suspenseful novel and one where you really can associate with the characters. You will fall in love with the little girl almost immediately as if she were your own. I couldn’t put this novel down. Even though it had a definitive ending you will want more, more, more… “  This endorsement came from….”Diane Bolick, Phoenix.”
 
“I was up until a ridiculous hour finishing this book – I literally could not put it down! It was a fantastic book. I really got drawn into the characters. Highly recommended for anyone who is a fan of psychological thrillers. Let’s just hope Mr. Bolick writes a second novel! “  This one is signed, FictionFan, but, again, the writer hails from Bolick’s town, Phoenix—leading one to wonder if that isn’t Aunt Peg. 
 
Then there’s Jordan R. Rose, another Arizonan, who lavishes praise on Bolick, and who is also from Arizona. At least he had the decency to (accidentally?) give the book just three out of five stars after labeling his review “Nicki’s Girl is a Must Read!” (Look up Jordan R. Rose—he is a colleague of Clint’s at the Goldwater Institute.) Apparently, some of the other 14 adoring reviewers are also connected to Bolick—though none of them came out and said so. For example, “C. Corriveau” turns out to work for the Alliance for School Choice, affiliated with…Bolick.
 
Now, almost every author jumpstarts their Amazon reader reviews by encouraging those who he/she knows to read and review the book, but isn’t this a bit much?  Read the reviews—they all have a certain phony ring to them—like political ads where indignant soccer moms words are actually written by corporate admen. Sigh…can’t we just have an honest policy debate for once?

Now, in the New York Times, comes a chilling story from Chile:

A judge in Santiago ruled Monday that a former Chilean president, Eduardo Frei Montalva, had been poisoned and charged three people connected with the Pinochet dictatorship with murder in the 28-year-old case. Alejandro Madrid, a judge with the Court of Appeals, said there was evidence that Mr. Frei, who was president of Chile from 1964 to 1970, was poisoned with low doses of mustard gas and thallium in the months before his death on Jan. 22, 1982. The poisoning at the Santa María Clinic in Chile’s capital compromised Mr. Frei’s immune system, the indictment said, and made him too weak to survive surgery for a stomach ailment, which the original autopsy had ruled as the cause of death. The indictment charged six people in connection with the killing. A doctor connected to Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s army, a former intelligence agent under the general and Mr. Frei’s driver were charged with murder. Two doctors who were alleged to have falsified the autopsy report were charged with covering up the killing, and a third was charged as an accomplice.”

In case people have forgotten, Pinochet was our guy—we helped remove the democratically elected person who he replaced, and our military and spy services had close relationships with Pinochet’s. Taught them quite a few tricks, in fact. Worth keeping in mind when we say that such dastardly things could never happen here at home. As for the doctors who falsified an autopsy report, it’s worth revisiting the JFK assassination if you haven’t paid the subject attention lately.