|
|
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
  Killing
the Defanged TigerThe
View From IsraelHow
Do I Stop Being Comlicit?Briefs |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
Killing the Defanged Tiger
PART II
Lorna Tychostup interviews Scott Ritter
Photo by Lorna Tychostup
This month, Lorna Tychostup continues her conversation with Scott Ritter, former Chief of the Concealment Investigations Unit with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspection team in Iraq, and author of Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem—Once and For All. Last month, Ritter discussed why he resigned from UNCSOM in 1998; Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities; US manipulation of the weapons inspections process in order to create a military confrontation with Iraq; and the recent American war on terror against what he termed, “Ill-defined enemies who may or may not exist.” This month Ritter delves into issues surrounding accusations of the US being caught with its “pants down” on 9/11, and the complicity of the American appetite for oil in an endless war fueled by ideology.
Lorna
Tychostup: Whose pants were down? Who locked themselves in a closet to not
know that those planes were going to come at us and do the damage that they
did? According to an article that we printed in our March issue, we had plenty of foreknowledge of Muslim people training to fly planes without wanting to learn how to take off or land them, just wanting to learn how to pilot them; reports of people calling the FBI and saying that they had overheard discussions, people were going to be using planes—not necessarily explosives—to crash into CIA headquarters. People are starting to question how we—if we are so knowledgeable about all this other stuff going on all around the world—how come we didn’t know we were going to be attacked?
Scott Ritter: I’d like to have people come in and work for a week as a CIA analyst. Welcome you into the concept of a fusion center where you sit down at a computer terminal and every five minutes you receive 1,500 pieces of intelligence information. And it never stops. It just keeps pouring in. Now I am going to come to you as your boss and say, “Prioritize the top 10 threats.” Now what do you do as an analyst? Do you send out an alert every time you get a piece of information before you’ve had a chance to check it out? I’m going to take every phone call that comes in seriously? Some crackpot lady in Florida calls up, “I’ve got terrorists in my backyard...” Somebody in Oklahoma calls up, “Two guys...I was on the airplane with them, and they talked about how easy it would be to hijack an airplane flight...” There is some guy in San Francisco, “I was sailing my boat the other day and when I landed at the dock there were three Arab guys looking at the Golden Gate Bridge saying, ‘We could drop that.’”
The information just comes in and comes in and comes in. And most of the time when you investigate it, it turns out to be nothing! So how do you begin to prioritize this stuff?…We collect data and we’re good at it. But we need someone to sort through this stuff. And that takes money and time. And it is not sexy. It doesn’t sell politically. Politicians aren’t going to make a great name for themselves trying to raise more money for an analyst. They are going to make money off of a spy satellite, off of some dramatic program.
Yeah, we fell asleep at the wheel. But it is a collective falling asleep at the wheel. And every American is guilty of this. The politicians, when they talk about raising money and raising funds, people are saying, “Give me a peace dividend. Give me a peace dividend. I want a peace dividend.” And they don’t even have a clue as to what they are talking about at the end of the Cold War. So what do they do? The politicians don’t want to shut down the aircraft production plants in their constituency’s neck of the woods because to do that would mean to lose jobs and nobody wants to lose a job. You want a peace dividend? Gosh, let’s go to the CIA where they have a whole bunch of analysts who do nothing but stare at photographs everyday and sort information. We don’t need them any more. There is no more Cold War. Let’s cut these guys.
And they cut them. So now the data pours in. We say, “Gosh. Aren’t we doing a great job? We launched twelve more satellites and we collect a lot more information.” These satellites are capable of intercepting cell phone conversations! Gee whiz! How many cell phone conversations do you think there are each day? And how many of them say absolutely NOTHING? And when you put this stuff through a computer, which we do every time we intercept a call, it sorts it. And what happens if the computer is trained to highlight every time you say “Scud missile.” Great. Now this conversation is going through a computer. Is this a dangerous conversation? NO. But every time we said “Scud missile,” an analyst is going to have to listen to this conversation. That takes time. What happens if you and I are trained to say, “Oranges and apples” instead of “scud missile” and the computer misses it? Now they’ve missed an important conversation.
We need analysts. And we don’t have them. That’s why we got beat. And we’re going to get beat. Because without the analysts poring through the data, we’re just going to be collecting more data. This lends itself to not only making mistakes, but gross oversimplifications. The world is gray. It’s not black and white. And yet we want to simplify things now in terms of black and white. When you do that, you only accept the information that falls into your black and white categories. You ignore the gray because it’s too hard and complex. But the gray is where the truth is. That’s why we failed and that’s why we are going to continue to fail.
LT: What would you say to the fact that one plane hits...Another plane hits. This scenario went on for a certain time period and we did nothing. There were no fighter planes in the air. There was no taking down. There was nothing.
SR: We had fighter planes in the air that were responding. If that plane that crashed in Pennsylvania had kept coming, we would have been in a horrible position of having an American fighter plane shoot an American airliner full of Americans. I think we were taken by surprise.
First of all, we shouldn’t be talking about having American fighter planes in the air over the USA to guard against hijacked airliners. [Let’s] talk about never allowing the airlines to get hijacked to begin with. If we had better analysts, if we had better capability to assess this data we should have been able to round up Mohammed Atta and his cohorts before they even got near the airport. I don’t want to live in a nation where I have F-16 fighters flying over my city consistently, constantly. I don’t want to live in a nation where every time I go to the airport I have to be concerned because we’ve got some underpaid staffers looking at a metal detector that somebody might slip in to hijack an airplane. I want to live in a nation where I have highly efficient intelligence organizations that nip these threats in the bud before they even start to materialize. That’s where I want to live.
And that’s what can happen. It’s cheaper. It’s more effective than putting fighter planes in the air. We’ve bankrupted the Air Force right now. The Air Force doesn’t have any money. Why? Because they’ve been flying stupid fighter planes over the country doing nothing. Nothing! Escorting every stupid airplane that suddenly has an engine problem or what normally happens in flight. How many more terrorists have hijacked planes since 9/11? Zero.
LT: So we’re in Afghanistan because of 9/11. We’re going to possibly be in Iraq next. You said, “War is almost inevitable.”
SR: Sure.
LT: We engaged in a war on terror, according to Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, that will be lasting 50 or 60 years and will potentially include as many countries. You said this is about ideology.
SR: This is purely ideology.
LT: What about the oil?
SR: Keep in mind that there are several ways to acquire oil. You buy it. You deal with the free market. Or you trade...this concept of perpetual war that allows the US to run around and dominate the world, including the oil-producing world. What I say about ideology is since September 11, the neo-conservative element of the Republican Party has been using the war on terror to push forward their version of the world. That’s how it’s ideology. Their vision of the world also includes how we access oil and can govern that. But if we had liberals in power we would still need to access oil. Oil is not an ideological thing. It is a constant. A reality.
LT: Yes, but accessing oil? In other countries people pay $4-5 per gallon. Accessing oil in the US means people put up a big fuss if they have to pay $2 for a gallon.
SR: Democrats do that and Republicans do it. It’s not ideology, it’s reality. Ideology is using the so-called war on terror to bully the Saudis, and bully the Kuwaitis, and bully other oil-producing regions to do our bidding because if they don’t, they’ll be viewed as pro-terrorists. That’s ideology.
LT: That’s what I mean. Underlying the ideology is an economic situation that can’t be denied. Why can’ t Americans pay $4-5 per gallon of gasoline if that’s what the Saudis want to charge us? Instead we are going to go to war. People will die. We will kill innocent people in other countries. People’s big question in my community is, what is going on here?
SR: Well, that’s a good question. That’s one that needs to be asked. There needs to be probing questions asked of your elected representatives.
LT: Maurice Hinchey also believes that we’re in Afghanistan because of 9/11.
SR: We are. There is no way anybody can state a substantiated argument other than that. Everything else is conspiracy theory, second gunmen on the knoll kind of stuff. We’re in Afghanistan because of
9/11. We would not have two divisions of American troops in Afghanistan if it weren’t for 9/11.
Now, if we would have had an interest in Afghanistan about a pipeline, that’s a totally separate issue. But we weren’t going to put two divisions of soldiers in Afghanistan for an oil pipeline. We put two divisions of soldiers in Afghanistan because we’re trying to take down a terrorist network that attacked the US.
LT: Is it possible that oil interests have created this war?...Do we need to wake up?
SR: We need to wake up! People in America, we have our cocoon of comfort. We have a pretty good life style here. But we have to understand what drives this lifestyle. It’s not just the resources that we produce in our country. It is the resources that we acquire abroad. We are 6 percent of the world’s population. We consume over 28 percent of the world’s oil. We consume 56 percent of the world’s natural resources. How do you think we get access to that, to those resources?
We do it through our foreign policy. Our foreign policy is not a benevolent foreign policy. It is a foreign policy that is dictated on the needs expressed by the American public. These needs are reflective of a desire to sustain our standard of living. And oil plays a huge role in this. We want cheap oil. So our foreign policy reflects this. This means that we do things with the Saudi government that might alienate certain fundamentalist segments of the Saudi society. We do things internationally that alienate a lot of people around the world.
And there is real anti-American sentiment out there today. It exists. We can’t pretend it doesn’t. And it exists because of the way we do business with the world. We don’t think it is bad. We sit here and say, “Hey, you know, we’re good people.” We are good people, but we’re ignorant people. We’re ignorant of the realities that exist beyond our borders—a reality that many times, much of the time, is governed by how we behave as a nation. And people are going to continue to hate us until we change the way we do business. And we’re not going to change the way we do business until we modify our appetites. Because it is our appetites—the appetites of the American public—that gets us in trouble overseas. Remember, the government is responding to the needs and wants of the people. Our appetites require our government to go out and gain access to these resources. And sometimes we have to do business with dictators. Sometimes we have to insure that we buy oil at a certain price. Sometimes we have to insure that we work with people who use slave and child labor and do horrific things to their own people, but all we care about is getting that load of zinc on the barge so it gets to the American market.
That’s the reality. And oil plays an important role in this…I’m as guilty as everybody else. I enjoy this lifestyle. I have to ask myself, “What sacrifices would I accept to send a signal to my government that maybe I don’t support us pulling exotic chemicals out of the soil in the Congo so that I can have more efficient computers, knowing that every time we pull that out we subsidize a civil war that allows people to hack the hands off of children?”
LT: What is your answer to your question?
SR: I don’t have an answer. I’m as guilty as everybody else!
LT: What can we do?
SR: Maybe it’s too simple, but weaning ourselves off of Middle East oil might be something that would be good. That means looking for alternative sources of energy. We need to change the way we interact with Islamic states, which means that we might have to rework the basis of this interaction. Right now that basis is built around oil. If we call this a national security issue—instead of spending $300 million on homeland security we could look for alternate sources of fuel, and not just solar energy, but coal burning energy, making nuclear power plants safer, and weaning us off Middle East oil—suddenly we find we have more freedom of movement when we interact with these people. And in doing so we can deal with them more as nation-states, as opposed to sources of oil. Right now, we have our access to Saudi Arabia, not because we really care about the Saudi royal family, we care about the Saudi oil. If we eliminated Saudi oil from the equation, suddenly we have to deal with Saudi Arabia as the complicated nation-state that it is. It would help us redefine our interaction with the world. It’s just one way of doing it.
LT: Have the events of 9/11 changed you?
SR: No. Not at all. 9/11 was a horrific tragedy, but I don’t view 9/11 as [validating] the Rumsfield/Wolfowitz war against the world. 9/11 is a terrible crime committed by a criminal organization. At the end of the day—I don’t mean to make this sound bad—all that happened is that four planes were hijacked. The nuclear bomb wasn’t dropped. War wasn’t declared. No division crossed our borders. No fleet. Criminals hijacked four planes. Now, they flew those planes into buildings. And there was a horrific result because of this. But what we’re dealing with is the hijacking of four aircraft. That’s it. I don’t mean to minimize it. But that’s it. And yet, somehow people now say that 9/11 has changed the world...I would say that, in many ways, the way we responded to 9/11—because we treated it as a world ending cataclysmic event—we’re causing even more people to hate us. If we can just step back and say, “What happened here? Terrorists hijacked four planes and flew them into buildings. Let’s go get those terrorists.”
What happens when there is a drug shooting, a drug gang goes bad, a crack house goes down, and suddenly the cops arrive the next day there are eight dead people on the floor. What happened there? A crime happened. A root cause of that crime is how we interact with Peru and Columbia, and the massive concept of the economics of drugs coming into the US. But a crime took place. What happened on September 11? A huge crime took place. There is a root cause for this crime, anti-American sentiment. But the world didn’t declare war on us. Islam didn’t declare war on us. I think the opposite. We’re the ones who overreacted and went to war against the world. A war that according to a certain ideology is going to last for 50 years. It’s insane.
LT: With the drug example. If you’re complicit, if there are eight people lying dead on the floor, you’re complicit if you loaned the money to the drug dealer—whether those people were shot to death or they OD’d, you’re complicit.
SR: Not only that. What if I’m the cop who was running the trigger man as my source to get to the bigger fish. And instead of putting him in jail I let him back out on the street so he could run around and gather information for me. Maybe I was doing so for a good cause and suddenly it went bad. I think what you’re getting at is that we’re complicit with these terrorists because some of our actions back in the 1970s. But remember, we did it for what we thought was a better calling—taking down the Soviet Union.
LT: But even more recently, negotiating with the Taliban for a pipeline through Afghanistan.
SR: Sure. But I don’t blame the Taliban for any of this. The Taliban is an extremist organization, but frankly speaking, the people of Afghanistan are worse off today than they were under the Taliban. And they’re going to be worse off in a year. Because the Taliban, extreme as they were, brought a sense of stability and order to their country. Women are not any better off today in Afghanistan. Not at all.
And it’s going to get even worse because it is going to break down into disorder, chaos, civil war. Hamid Karzai is not going to last very much longer. Already you see that nobody wants to expand the peacekeeping force outside of Kabul, which means that the countryside in Afghanistan is doomed to chaos. American troops just spent 16 days hunting down a guerrilla force. We claimed to kill thousands. We find 25. They all got away. We’re leaving that territory; they’re going to come back.
If this doesn’t sound like Vietnam, I don’t know what it sounds like. We haven’t done the people of Afghanistan any favors by going in there the way that we have. The Taliban was never the problem. And I would say the Taliban was actually the solution. That if we had engaged in diplomatic interaction with the Taliban we would have recognized the fact that there was a moderate wing in the Taliban. A moderate wing that viewed Osama bin Laden as the seed of their eventual demise and they would have cooperated with us to get rid of him.
As it is right now, we forced them together. The Taliban and al-Qaeda now are fighting for their lives. We don’t have Osama bin Laden. And we certainly haven’t defeated al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Not in Afghanistan. Not anywhere in the world.
What I see is that the art of diplomacy is something that America has lost. We’ve lost the ability to diplomatically interact with nations. As a result, if we don’t get our way, we tend to go to covert action or outright military action. There is a time and place to fight. There is a time and place to carry out covert action. But these should be tools that are put on the shelf. The first tool, especially for civilized people, should be the tool of diplomacy. The art of discussing, talking, listening, listening,
listening, I’m going to emphasize that one more time, listening. We don’t listen to anybody. We preach, preach, preach. And the second they raise up their point of view we say, “Shut up. You’re either with us or with the terrorists.” We’ve lost the ability to listen to people, to comprehend that they have legitimate concerns driven by the reality of their lives. The region they live in. We don’t care anymore it seems.
 |
||||
 |
|
|
||
 |
||||
|
||||
|
|
|
||
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
|
||
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
|
||
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
|
||
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
|
||
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
|
||
|
||||
Copyright © 2002 Luminary Publishing.
All rights reserved.
PO Box 459 New Paltz NY 12561
PO Box 459 New Paltz NY 12561