Book Read Free

iWar

Page 26

by Bill Gertz


  CIA sources familiar with the internal dispute revealed to me that during a heated meeting at CIA headquarters on March 9, 2010, CIA officials clashed with Justice Department lawyers who were supporting the John Adams Project. The discussion centered on the wording of an interagency memorandum that was to be used to brief President Obama and senior administration aides on the photographs found in one terrorist’s prison cell. Justice officials opposed the language, which cited the grave dangers to the CIA personnel if their identities were leaked from Guantanamo to al Qaeda terrorists through their lawyers. The memo was being prepared for White House National Security Council aide John Brennan, who later became CIA director. The CIA won the argument and the language was kept in. Fitzgerald prevailed, and several Justice Department lawyers, including Vieira, stepped aside from any role in the probe. “They have put the lives of CIA officers and their families in danger,” a senior official close to the investigation told me, referring to the detainees’ lawyers and their supporters. For the liberal Left, the danger to the CIA officers was less important than advancing the politically correct agenda of closing the prison in Cuba. A senior Pentagon official expressed disgust that Justice officials and the civil liberties activists had shown more concern for the imprisoned al Qaeda terrorists than the security of CIA officers. “By the time this is over, they will be building monuments to the terrorists,” the official told me.

  For the military, Obama closed out his final year in office with a reputation for imposing his radical liberal left agenda on the armed forces. His appointees at the Pentagon unleashed a series of damaging policies that compounded earlier harm resulting from nearly $1 trillion in defense spending cuts imposed during the president’s tenure. Several conservative military leaders had their careers cut short, among them Marine Corps general James Mattis, commander of the frontline U.S. Central Command whose gung ho spirit had earned him the nickname Mad Dog Mattis. Under Obama, some eighteen commanding officers of various military units were fired or forced into retirement under politically correct Pentagon policies.

  Politically correct information warfare policies under Defense Department political appointees went so far as to force military leaders to alter war plans to include false dire warnings about the alleged danger of climate change, despite thin evidence that global warming in any way would affect future operations. The bogus concern over climate change came as the military had been so weakened under Obama policies that it was forced to abandon the decades-long policy of being ready to fight two wars simultaneously. By 2016, American military capabilities to prevail in a single conflict had atrophied significantly. Yet the Pentagon called climate change an “urgent and growing threat” in 2015, and a year later a directive to all commanders from Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter struck a new tone of ridiculous political correctness: “Incorporate climate change impacts into plans and operations and integrate DoD guidance and analysis in Combatant Command planning to address climate change–related risks and opportunities across the full range of military operations, including steady-state campaign planning and operations and contingency planning.” Military officers and enlisted who had joined the services to defend the nation and fight and win the nation’s wars were instead finding themselves forced to spend valuable resources on fruitless campaigns designed to wage war against the weather.

  The liberal left deception of “white privilege” also was forced upon the military by the Pentagon agenda. Military units, in a policy mirroring the Communist Party commissars of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, hired speakers to present the negative history of the white race in America. The public interest law group Judicial Watch revealed in army documents it obtained that “white privilege” training was held at Fort Gordon, near Augusta, Georgia, for four hundred soldiers. The training included a PowerPoint slide that stated, “Our society attaches privilege to being white and male and heterosexual. . . . Race privilege gives whites little reason to pay a lot of attention to African Americans.”

  As seen in the knee-jerk reaction to the Orlando shooting, liberal agitation for tighter gun control impacted the Pentagon. An Obama executive order directed the Pentagon to begin research and development on “smart gun” technology, designed to restrict the firing of guns to their owners through biometrics or PIN numbers.

  Under the liberal feminist agenda of the Obama administration, halting sexual assaults in the military became the services’ highest priority, prompting many soldiers to question whether their fundamental mission of fighting and winning America’s wars had been altered. The hysteria over sexual assaults—surveys at the Pentagon on the number of sexual assaults were contradicted by private studies showing the Defense Department had vastly overstated the problem—led to the false prosecution of an air force sergeant who faced 130 years in prison for allegedly making sexual advances at Minot Air Force Base, in North Dakota. The soldier was found to be not guilty of all sex charges and the victim of an out-of-control politically correct atmosphere among commanders at the base. Not content with integrating women into frontline combat units, and despite open opposition to the move from the U.S. Marine Corps, which regarded the shift as undermining training and fighting ability, the Pentagon took the even more radical and potentially more disruptive step of allowing sexual transgenders to remain in the service. In the past, sexual deviancy was viewed as undermining good order and discipline and grounds for dismissal. The army revealed in budget documents that soldiers would have the right to “self-identify” as whatever sex they preferred. “Instead of preparing for transgenderism and related social experiments, our troops should be concentrating on combat readiness,” said Elaine Donnelly, who directs the Center for Military Readiness. “The military is a resilient institution, but strong leadership in the next administration will be needed to restore its strength and morale.”

  The navy in particular seemed to run aground under the Obama administration’s political correctness policies. Obama’s navy secretary, Ray Mabus, delighted in naming warships for liberal left civil rights and labor activists.

  As shown earlier, the most significant left liberal information warfare operation under the Obama administration was directed against the American public and government to obfuscate the Iranian nuclear deal in 2015. Again, “[w]e created an echo chamber,” declared Ben Rhodes, Obama’s inexperienced foreign policy adviser and former speechwriter, who spent eight years as the White House deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. Rhodes made the remark in the revealing interview with David Samuels, who reported in a New York Times Magazine piece on how Rhodes helped bamboozle the American public about the Iran nuclear deal during negotiations in 2015. Using lies, half-truths, and deception, Rhodes orchestrated a propaganda Wurlitzer of news reporters and liberal experts to promote the Iran deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say,” he said.

  The political agenda of the liberal Left in the United States is destroying the fabric of American society. It is the culmination of the New Left Marxism of the 1970s and is embodied in two politicians who dominated the early decades of the twenty-first century: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

  Angelo Codevilla, a conservative national security strategist, believes liberal left progressivism currently in fashion already ignited what he terms an imperial revolution that has subverted constitutional government. “In fact, the 2016 election is sealing the United States’ transition from that republic to some kind of empire,” he warned in an essay published by the Claremont Institute a month before the election. A bipartisan ruling class of both left and right is using political correctness to advance its ideological agenda based on the concept of antidiscrimination to do away with American traditions and freedoms. Arbitrary power is replacing the rule of law and the defense of constitutional freedoms.

  For example, Americans’ rights guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence and codified in the Bill of Rights have been transformed into government-defined civil
rights according to liberal political dictates. Religious freedom, free speech and free assembly, keeping and bearing arms, freedom from warrantless searches, and other rights are natural rights, and securing those rights for Americans has been what the United States was built on. Yet the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, reflecting the liberal progressive revolutionary fervor, wants to limit the foremost of those rights. The commission stated in a September 2016 report that “religious exemptions to the protections of civil rights based upon classifications such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability status, sexual orientation, and gender identity, when they are permissible, significantly infringe upon those civil rights.” Further, the report states that Americans’ rights under the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights should not be allowed, noting that “the phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy, or any form of intolerance.” The terms used by the commission are all buzzwords adopted by the mavens of political correctness.

  Codevilla warns that the future under this liberal progressive transformation is bleak:

  In today’s America, a network of executive, judicial, bureaucratic, and social kinship channels bypasses the sovereignty of citizens. Our imperial regime, already in force, works on a simple principle: the president and the cronies who populate these channels may do whatever they like so long as the bureaucracy obeys and one third plus one of the Senate protects him from impeachment.

  Electing either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump cannot change that trajectory. Because each candidate represents constituencies hostile to republicanism, each in its own way, these individuals are not what this election is about. This election is about whether the Democratic Party, the ruling class’s enforcer, will impose its tastes more strongly and arbitrarily than ever, or whether constituencies opposed to that rule will get some ill-defined chance to strike back. Regardless of the election’s outcome, the republic established by America’s Founders is probably gone. But since the Democratic Party’s constituencies differ radically from their opponents’, and since the character of imperial governance depends inherently on the emperor, the election’s result will make a big difference in our lives.

  The Democratic Party will continue its drive to impose the revolutionary agenda aimed at transforming America. For the Republican Party, it is in turmoil and must regroup in the coming years from the ashes of its failure to heed traditionalist Americans’ desire to block the progressive transformation.

  In many ways, the politically correct ideology poses an existential threat to the long-term health of the United States and must be countered with an information warfare program that uses truth to expose false and destructive ideas and operations.

  * * *

  I. For details on deaths under communism, see The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, by Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin. Harvard University Press, 1999.

  9

  INFORMATION AMERICA

  We Have Met the Enemy and It’s Not Us

  The single biggest failing on the U.S. side in the war of ideas is that there is no institution tasked with and responsible for the conduct of it—only individual, sporadic initiatives.

  —ROBERT R. REILLY, FORMER DIRECTOR, VOICE OF AMERICA

  Historians will look back on the administration of President Barack Obama as a dark period in American history. The power and prestige of the country, diminished by a leader who viewed the United States as an imperialist and racist power to be weakened, will take decades to recover. At the same time the country was being damaged from within, the power of hostile foreign states and other powers grew at an unprecedented rate. Instead of a global environment often referred to as Pax Americana, in which the United States is a leading force for peace and stability, the world is being ravaged by America’s enemies, who are promoting a dark vision of statism, centralized power, harsh controls on freedom, and, for Islamic terrorists, the nightmare of a global, Muslim-inspired theocratic empire in which all those who do not share its precepts are enemies to be converted or destroyed.

  There is hope, however. The damage wrought by Obama can be undone and must be repaired if the nation is to survive as the founders envisioned and to remain the land of the free and the home of the brave.

  • • •

  “America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.” That quotation, frequently attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville’s nineteenth-century classic, Democracy in America, presents a fundamental truth about the United States of America. Never before in American history has the threat to national survival been as great as it is today. The war America confronts this time is an information war, spanning an array of methods and platforms. From China’s Three Warfares—legal, psychological, and media warfare—to Russia’s use of sophisticated, KGB-like information warfare, disinformation, and hybrid war, to Islamism’s deadly hydralike spread through social media, the United States is under twenty-four-hour ideological assault.

  The ill-fated quest of the administration of President Barack Obama to transform America into what he views as a country more admired around the world backfired terribly. Instead, the “Apologize for America” administration has produced the exact opposite of its intended goal. American friends and allies around the world today are alienated and disenfranchised by a president who instead has curried favor with America’s enemies and would-be adversaries.

  The creation of a new organization I call Information America is urgently needed to conduct a wide-ranging program of offensive and defensive information warfare to promote and protect constitutional democracy, liberty, rule of law, freedom of press and religion, and free markets.

  This program must systematically confront and defeat the increasing Information Age lies and disinformation about America—not only abroad but inside the country, where a fundamentally anti-American ideology espoused by utopian liberal leftists has become pervasive and reached heights of power not seen before in U.S. history.

  The weapon of choice used by this Information America system is simple: telling the truth—about America, and about its enemies, using modern, intellectually grounded and sophisticated communications tools and techniques. The stakes in today’s information warfare have never been higher, and ultimately the survival of our free and open society is in the balance. In the information sphere, as General Douglas MacArthur said of conventional warfare, there is no substitute for victory. And these information activities and counter-activities must be built on a moral clarity of purpose, amid an increasingly immoral and value-neutral world.

  America is threatened today as never before. Enemies foreign and domestic have been attacking in the information sphere, seemingly at will. The nation’s wealth and power are being aggressively challenged by states like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. The Islamic State terrorist group, successor to the perpetrator of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, is expanding from its bases in the Middle East into Europe, North Africa, and Asia with little resistance, despite limited military attacks on its leaders and facilities in the Middle East and North Africa. Islamic State supporters by 2016 had begun killing Americans inside the United States, and the danger will continue to increase because the American security apparatus appears helpless against the religiously charged ideology of the Islamic State. The reason is simple: killing Islamist enemies, while important in warfare, ultimately is insufficient for winning the war against radical Islamic terror. And make no mistake, it is war. Only a concerted, multitiered ideological and information-based war can bring victory.

  Likewise, the failure of American statesmen to counteract the threat posed by Chinese hegemonism in Asia is endangering the peace and security of the world, as China seeks to drive the
United States out of the region. Like the Islamic State, the Chinese must be fought and defeated on the ideological front. Similarly, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the neofascist pan-Eurasian aggression that seeks control over the European continent represent a geopolitical danger that must be confronted and defeated ideologically. In regard to Iran, misguided and self-deluding U.S. foreign policies that attempted to coax the radical Islamic theocratic state to evolve into a nonthreatening regional power likewise have utterly failed.

  Instead, the current policy of appeasement has produced even greater dangers to world peace and stability. Again, the solution to the Iranian threat must be built on ideas and implemented through information warfare operations that can produce a lasting peace. North Korea is an increasingly dangerous and erratic nuclear weapons state that repeatedly threatens to unleash a nuclear war. It too must also urgently become the target of American information warfare designed to mitigate the danger.

  The first step in solving the problem is to recognize America is under attack from enemies waging strategic information warfare. This problem was addressed in a 2012 study produced by the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff and ordered by U.S. Army general Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Dempsey had called for the military to study the lessons learned from a decade of war on terrorism. The fifty-page report found the ten-year period following the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and subsequent U.S.-led military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere lacked a strategic understanding of information warfare needed in the war on terror. For a decade, “the US was slow to recognize the importance of information and the battle for the narrative in achieving objectives at all levels,” the report concluded, adding that “it was often ineffective in applying and aligning the narrative to goals and desired end states.” The failure on the information battlefield was characterized by a lack of leadership and resources that needed to focus on using information “as an instrument of national power.”

 

‹ Prev