President’s Message
July 2010
In the June 30 edition of the Rossmoor News, my column,
From the Right, described the
experiences and insights gained from our recent cruise through the Middle East.
Space was not available to provide a complete report so here are some things
that were missing.
To begin with, we learned some troubling things about the Bush
administration’s decision to invade Iraq, based on intelligence that
Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.
General Hugh Shelton, at that time Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
expressed the strong opinion to President Bush that Saddam was not so engaged.
The military intelligences services could find no evidence of such
activity.
The civilian hawks, on the other hand, among them Paul
Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney, strongly believed
otherwise. Moreover, these men took
the position that the United
States had been surprised by the attack of
September 11, 2001 and that it would be irresponsible to have such an attack
repeated because we were indecisive about making a pre-emptive strike to
neutralize a threat.
In support of the argument to attack Iraq, was
information in a report the CIA received from a source believed to be credible
by the British and German intelligence services.
A single source, mind you; code-named
Curveball. When the CIA
asked our allies for a chance to question this source, they refused.
Why in the world would our allies do this in light of the fact that a
major war was being planned on the basis of his information?
The answer: the United States can’t keep secrets.
And because we can’t keep secrets, our allies must protect their
intelligence assets by refusing us access to them.
The United States Congress is the major source of intelligence
leaks. After closed-door
intelligence briefings, our Senators, Representatives and their staffs are
famous for having loose lips following a few drinks in Capitol Hill’s watering
holes. Knowledge of what happens to America’s intelligence secrets made it impossible
to develop assets within Saddam’s Iraq.
We were therefore flying blind when we made the decision to invade.
Finally, and saddest of all, we later learned that
Curveball was an alcoholic and a
congenital liar. So the next time
you look at the list of American young men and women whose lives were lost---or
physically or emotionally scarred---in
Iraq, remember how our intelligence community
has been betrayed by those who had sworn to protect and defend our nation.
Before we leave the subject of betrayals, however, let us not
forget the New York Times and its
unctuous excuse for revealing our secrets as “the people’s right to know.”
It was the Times that decided to ignore Bush administration pleas and
published, in late 2005, the story revealing the administration’s program to
track al Qaeda communications. And
it was the Times that later ran a
front-page article detailing how the government was tapping into the
international bank transfer system, enabling us to track terrorist financing
and, with it, names and developing plots.
Thanks to “the people’s right to know,” our counter-terrorism efforts
have been severely crippled.
Finally, another thing we learned about the Middle East is that disinformation and propaganda passes
for knowledge, even among the supposedly educated.
During our transit of the Suez Canal, an
attractive Egyptian woman came aboard to lecture on the waterway’s importance.
As we were passing under a bridge spanning the canal and connecting the
Sinai with Egypt proper, we
were informed that it was the tallest suspension bridge in the world.
Clearly not the case, when that honor goes to Japan’s
Akashi-Kaikyō Bridge that carries the Honshu-Shikoku Highway in a crossing of
the Akashi Strait.
Indeed, the bridge we were passing under would look like a tinker-toy
when standing next to our magnificent Golden Gate,
which is only the 9th tallest in the world.
But it got worse.
Her head decorously wrapped in a colorful hijab, our lecturer told us of the
canal’s importance in stopping the Israeli “aggressors” during the 1973 Yom
Kippur War. She told how courageous
Egyptian commandoes had crossed the canal under the cover of darkness, sowed
panic among the Israeli forces and forced them to turn tail and run for home.
With that, many of our fellow passengers walked out in protest.
Gone from this revisionist history was any mention that the
war was started by Syria and
Egypt,
and that in the region of Suez 500 Israeli soldiers faced 80,000 Egyptians.
After being pushed back, the Israelis regrouped, counter-attacked,
crossed the canal and were within 65 miles of Cairo before a cease-fire
was organized by the U.N. The
Egyptians had in fact been thoroughly humiliated, but that’s not what our
“educated” lecturer believed.
Willful ignorance combined with fevered jihad
provides fertile soil in the Middle East for
the terrorist efforts against us. And
when we blind ourselves by leaking our secrets and exposing our intelligence
assets overseas, we are inviting murderous attacks on American cities.
