Thank You, Military Hero
I want to sincerely thank the military heroes who -- even right now -- may be thwarting another false flag attack in America.
By way of background, I read with gratitude that the "CENTCOM Commander’s Veto Sank Bush’s Threatening Gulf Buildup".
And I also believe that good people in the military -- who love this country and the Constitution -- have thwarted some of the neocon's other crazy plans.
For example, someone blew the whistle on nuclear bombs which were "accidentally" loaded onto a B-52 bomber and flown above the U.S. As some have reported, it would have been virtually impossible for nuclear weapons to have been accidentally mixed up with conventional weapons. Thank you to the anonymous hero who blew the whistle and stopped whatever dark deed was being planned.And the Pentagon put a stop to Cheney's plans to bomb Iran in summer 2007.
So to the behind-the-scenes heroes who are "just saying no" to senseless war or another false flag attack . . .
Thank You.
I'm just a civilian, and I don't know what it is like to stand in your shoes. But I do know that the people of good faith in the military can save our country from dictatorship, poverty, and despair by preventing "another 9/11"; that is, an attack by elements of our very own government.
We the people of the United States are counting on you to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic . . . no matter how high and mighty they may be.
We thank you for doing the right thing.
9 Comments:
Let me join you in saying thanks to all the men and women in the military who would put their careers on the line to stop the madness.
Officers have an obligation to refuse an illegal order. Thank goodness some of them appear to finally be doing it.
Thank God for people like this! Fallon for President? Who knows. He showed a trait that is lacking in politicos today: Backbone. God Bless you Mr Fallon.
The Smedley Butlers of the 21st century are standing up. Too early to relax, but this is a good sign that our country is made of the right stuff to withstand the nuts, those on the left and the right.
Another hero, from cnn.
"NORFOLK, Virginia (AP) -- A military jury recommended that a Navy lawyer spend six months in prison and be dismissed from the service for sending a human rights attorney the names of 550 Guantanamo Bay detainees in an unmarked Valentine's Day card.
Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz was convicted Thursday at his court martial of communicating secret information about Guantanamo Bay detainees that could be used to injure the United States and three other charges of leaking information to an unauthorized person."
Americans Of Every Party In All States Demanding Our American Congress & Senate Uphold Our U.S. Constitution
Disenfranchised Republican, Democratic, Independent and Americans of every other party are acting together to force changes in both parties platforms. Our goal is to affect the course of the ship of state and cause both primary parties to adopt our platform or have the support we gather vote for the party that does include our platform. We the American people demand change in this nation which has gone astray. FIRST and formost a PERMANENT BAN on ALL experiments involving torture against citizens of the United States, WHETHER they involve the furthering of military experimental studies OR behavioral modification to dissuade commercial competition, or for ANY OTHER purpose against unarmed American private individual citizens. Public review of all foreign aid packages; upon discovery that such aid is ill- advised based on current political and or military security such aid be increased or withdrawn. Public review of NAFTA and GAT that have resulted in the reduction of jobs and the industrial base in the USA. Increase in the number of Senate, Congressional, State and Local acceptance and action on letters from the public complaining of systemic abuse and corruption as it is now routine that that such reports of corruption go unread, unadressed and unanswered.
That investigations into deliberate "clearing" of the population to allow an influx of foreigners be assigned a high priority, as well as complete investigations into "Eugenics" programs carried out by ANY party on American soil and the strictest PROHIBITIONS thereupon emplaced. As an example, the following proposed legislation about human rights and the course of our plan to reform the nation. Support the privately proposed BILL "Safeguard USA" from John Mecca. Attacks by government agents on innocent men, women and children in their homes within the United States by using implanted microchips and microwave guns is going on all over the country. The following proposed BILL titled "Safeguard USA" was sent to all U.S. Senators Jan. 11, 2006. Thousands of web sites have stories about ordinary people reporting the same activity. Fraudulent profiles are used to allow adding names of anybody to enemy combatant lists, making it lawful to launch
unnecessary investigations using devices that destroy the immune system of those under surveillance. Doctors, lawyers, politicians, clergy are not immune from being placed on the lists of those to be placed under this form of investigation; then there are the innocent women and children also being attacked in this manner. Read carefully then take action. The US government, federal, state and local authorities and other parties are using microwave and acoustic weapons as well as implanted devices to attack thousands of Americans openly in their homes right now today. This is a well documented fact well known but not reported in the mainstream news. We implore you to write to your Senators and call their offices in support of the "Safeguard USA" Proposed BILL. Many lives are in serious danger, your efforts will insure that Freedom in this country still does exist. A full copy of the BILL is below for review. We need your help to implement the strategy of pressuring Senators to do what is legally and morally right. At the top & bottom of the page you will find a URL link to all internet newspapers and most big media outlets, Senators, and Congressmen. Write a letter to them to build up pressure and interest in passing the BILL regarding innocent Americans plight. The Legislation proposal has already been sent to ALL Senators and 100 Congressmen, Most Media Outlets Newspapers, TV Networks and Magazines. Totaling approximately 240 snail US postal mail letters with the Safeguard USA Legislation and explanatory letters; the plan is for 100 or so more. Because of cost only Calif. and NY Congressmen were sent letters. Write & call to all that you can. As you will read in the Legislation the Senators have 30 days to respond favorably. If they refuse to address properly the issue to make it illegal we need to send follow up letters to those we first wrote to saying that the Senators refused or did not respond and therefore they are endorsing TORTURE. Let everyone know then when and if they refuse that they are in favor of TORTURE of their own citizens without trial and in front of their families. This is mentioned as well in the legislation.
All legitimate Americans of any moral conscience must get on board with this immediately as these programs have been conducted for decades already. Now is the time for all Americans to come to the aid of their Nation. God Bless you all and may you find Strength, Courage, and Freedom. Again what I ask of you is to go about a campaign of writing to get the people in this country to pay attention especially referencing Guantanamo and other secret prison torture activities wherein your letters pointedly tell about torture in our homes here inside the US borders. Proposed Legislation Letter sent to all Senators follows:
To: Honorable Senators: Senate, Washington D.C. Urgent: U.S. Citizens Tortured and Murdered Under Guise of Experimentation & Investigation Inside U.S. borders. Honorable Senators: This is a request to have the new Bill titled "Safeguard USA" brought to the attention of the Senate. We ask you as a Senator to endorse it and immediately pass it through to Congress. Text of the "Safeguard USA" Bill follows explanation as to "the" why of its purpose. Reasons you will benefit from presenting this Bill to the Senate are multiple. Private American individuals are rapidly losing confidence in the legitimacy of our governmnet and raising their voices in perfectly justified indignation. Internationally, America has been identified as a bastion of Human Rights, yet even now those rights are routinely violated every day. By supporting this legislation, activist groups around the country will endorse you and a re-awakening of respect will be part of your legacy. You need to do this to retain any moral authority or legitimate claim to leadership. You can save lives and stem potential dissent that must result from the continued allowance of these heinous, inhuman, unamerican illegal criminal activities. You can save lives that are covertly and secretly being destroyed with the encouragement of illegal, amoral, illegitimate, unamerican, unethical and entirely criminal elements within our own governmnet and society. You can stop a nazi infection, which if allowed to continue will divide and very possibly destroy our beloved nation as that is the aim of these criminals. Above all in doing so you will save our nation and bring back our country, gaining the confidence and trust of the people once again.
You have 30 days to answer this inquiry. Should you not answer within 30 days, it will be understood from your inaction that you are actually in favor of allowing covert torture using directed radio waves and secretly implanted devices on U.S. citizens inside their houses being done by the U.S. GOVERNMENT and its Associates. Subsequently notice will be made to the general public, media and industry as to where you stand on this proposed legislation titled (Safeguard USA). Obviously constituents, media and industry that we will contact with your decision will be totally shocked if such legislation is not wholeheartedly endorsed. All persons who have authority to stop such activity and do not, will be accomplices in such capital crimes. This letter is on behalf of several thousand citizens being tortured in their homes right here in the United States. All of their requests to authorities for help have been ignored and their own research into this matter indicates secret National Security policy is responsible. If you do not know about or do not wish to believe that such things are going on as described, regardless there should be such a law as that proposed in this correspondence. If you truly don't know about this it may have to do with the phrase "Need To Know" used to keep even Senators from knowing about dark activities; so you should demand from the CIA, NSA, FBI, "Homeland" Security and Police the facts about it, and then consider that they will be telling you half-truths. Such a law should be on the books regardless of the beliefs of non-technically oriented individuals. Those who are victims are reporting the same torturous behavioral and immune system destruction technology is being used, such as directed energy radio frequency and implanted devices. From their research they are finding that it is being done by a combination of law enforcement investigations together with military run corporate research, sanctioned by many policy annunciation's. One of many legislated policies that appears to be being used and needs to be made moot is U.S. Code "War and National Defense" Subpart 1520a, this statute has text that can be interpreted to allow any action on any citizen. Such a legislative debacle must be corrected by proposing and passing the enclosed "Proposed Legislation (Safeguard USA)".
Senators, too, might be implanted with a covertly installed microchip yourselves or be subjects of directed energy mind control experimentation to sway your opinion through hypnotic suggestion or decrease your mental acuity in order to force you to defer much of your reading and decision making to others. Our investigation has shown from experience that people doing this have chosen extraordinarily wealthy people, police, FBI Agents and on a subjected basis there are indicators from watching prominent politicians on television that may be victims as well. Symptoms can be as simple as waking up haggard, insomnia, just as you are drifting off to sleep feeling shocks or seeing faint lights or hearing mechanical sounds. It would pay for you to follow up and learn as much as possible about these things; a large number of private individual Americans across the U.S. have supplied information that could certainly be useful to save America from these despicably unamerican criminal activities. Additionally as a separate issue, we ask for your endorsement to fund a new federal agency to be called "Safeguard USA Corps" which will be chaired by private persons who have been victims, to oversee counter-surveillance of illegal electronic attack and or harmful electronic investigative activities such as described here in this letter using existent advanced technology to detect and arrest ALL offenders regardless of unconstitutional extra-legal pronouncements used in carrying out their objectives. Further details of this proposed "Safeguard USA Corps" will be sent upon your response to our priority issue of the Proposed Legislation. Your liability is genuine as we will bring the attention of the American people to this issue affecting their most basic Constitutional Rights and Freedoms. In advance of any legislative process you must consider that if it is diluted to any degree it will not be effective as regards to this proposed legislation formulation.
The American people will in fact take action in regard to any opportunity to bring those to justice whom defer or ignore this demand of immediate cessation of actions against Constitutionally protected American citizens and private individual Americans. Be additionally ADVISED that many thousands of victims mentioned are being used to hide the actual true numbers affected, which research has been developed suggesting that a full 1/2 of the U.S. population may already have been implanted with advanced polymer plastic implants nearly impossible to detect. The symptoms where people are sensitized to radio frequency energy can be modest enough that such victims have few if any symptoms; however upon their general sensitization being accomplished the operators of the transmitters can increase the energy and modulate the frequency to cause heart attack, stroke or death along with conditions such as auto immune disorders, syndromes, mental depreciation of concentration or diminished capability to the level of 3 year- olds or as simple as sleep deprivation symptoms even without causing outright insomnia. "Proposed Legislation": "Safeguard USA" PROHIBITED with liability of Criminal Penalties are any action on any United States citizen where they are under investigation or experimented on without their express personal signatory knowledge and permission, which in either case where methods are used that can adversely affect their physiology; enforceable regardless as well whether or not those carrying out such activities are aware of the adverse effects being present.
This Statute is in force for any action on any United States citizen where they are experimented on without their express personal signatory knowledge of and permission to do so. Methodology prohibited by this statute are acoustic devices such as LRAD, radio frequency, microwave, see through the wall technology, drugs, gasses, biological materials, hypnotic methodology of any kind, electromagnetic energy, internally implanted, external microchip
transmitters, photon device whether hybrid or not, masers or any device emitting any kind of energy. Prohibited by this statute is the use of such devices mentioned herein by any and all branches of government whether Federal, State, or Local Authority, or by any private source foreign or domestic without exemption. Furthermore no legal or extra-legal authority may grant or even entertain special mitigation of the prohibition of the use of such devices and techniques for use on any private individual or any American citizen. Such prohibition is in force regardless of any reasons even when National Security Issues are considered to be at risk; this is due to their being issues presented during the formation of this statute that such assertions of National Security as an issue has been abused and will therefore continue to be used as a shield to permit heinous immoral acts, therefore such shields must as well be prohibited. Covered by this statute are all entities or persons mentioned as having used, or potentially could have or may have caused others to use such devices and technology mentioned, as Criminally liable and Civilly liable without any limit whatsoever on punitive damages. Whether or not it was known by them while they were committing such acts where they were unaware such technology could adversely affect the persons being targeted knew of such dangers as it is the obligation of the authors, operators and managers to know such issues of danger having to do with such activities. This legislation will be effective retroactive to the time where mental or physically harmful effects have caused harm to any US citizen or private individual American, whether or not such citizen was stripped of their full citizenship rights by secret legislation not disclosed to them. In addition all and any FOIA / FOIL requests where reference to a persons being exposed to potentially dangerous methodology as described here must under this legislation without exception have their requests properly filled without redaction, and their request exempted from all exemptions that could be used to refuse their request. Furthermore no agency bar none is exempt from
FOIA / FOIL requests even such as the "Homeland" Security Agency. Additionally, even such agencies which have exemptions permitting their refusal to answer including any agency or organization having exemption from FOIA /FOIL requests, as well as all private entities must comply with answering FOIA / FOIL requests pertinent to the issues contained herein and subject to the penalties outline within this legislation described. All efforts are to be made to investigate and release records pertinent to the use of all human beings that have been used in the way described in this Statute for the purpose of apprising them of their being targeted. Such efforts will further be in the form of public announcements in newspapers, radio and television at the expense of the U.S. Government to commence immediately upon the passing of this Statute. "Penalties": PENALTIES for breaking this Statute and being found guilty are mandatory 40-year sentence without possibility of parole. This liability of penalty applies to any person regardless of political rank, military rank, civil servant rank as well as all civilians including medical doctors or researchers and their associates. As well as any person whom knows about such activities and does nothing to report such activities, whether or not a superior tells them to say nothing; where saying nothing makes them an accomplice to a crime by their silence. Liable parties would include enforcement authorities who refuse to listen and act when told of such activities by whistle-blowers or victims and refuse to investigate properly where by this statute they are required to investigate with the legally authorized use of technology existing for such purpose, where such equipment is to be paid for by the U.S. Government. Destruction of files pertinent to human experimentation and the files of projects having to do with human experimentation and or investigation as mentioned herein are liable both Criminally and Civilly regardless of their being in government or private organizations or persons. Destruction of files despite their existence after the fact of destruction will carry the proscribed penalties for such persons and for their superiors.
NO legal exemptions to this statute are permitted for any agency or person including agency heads and also apply to foreign persons regardless of their having diplomatic immunity. This legislation supercedes all immunity and exemptions for independent action by all civil and military authority executives. Where further as an issue all laws, statutes, policy, directives and practices to experiment on any U.S. citizen or private individual American without their express personal signatory knowledge of and permission, are hereby considered illegal and moot; where such prior laws, statutes, policy, directives and practices allowing such are required to be removed from all files of any kind. All such permissions from subjects when obtained as stipulated by this proposed legislation upon its adoption are required to be sent notices monthly reaffirming their permission and consent in writing where they would need to sign anew such a document and then send it back to the requesting authority, otherwise it expires the permission; to continue the experimental activity on that person to further prevent abuse. Such permission contracts are required to be specially worded with a statement at the very top of the first page of a monthly notice made in bold #16 typeset print have the following statement " You have given your authorization to be experimented on for the following described experiment ". Furthermore, NO person is allowed to give their permission to do any experiment on another person regardless of the anticipated subjects mental capacity to understand the issues, wherein another person takes responsibility for such permission as such action on behalf of another is illegal and punishable by 40 years without possibility of parole in prison for engaging in volunteering a person. End of Proposed Legislation.
adapted from "Four Score and Seven Friedman Units Ago . . ." by Rusty1776 at Daily Kos
Four score and seven Friedman Units ago, The Decider blew up his first frog. Thanks to Big Tony Scalia, he smirked his way into the White House and is blowing up entire countries now. As we've seen, the empty suits and dresses of the 110th Congress have no problem with that. But we do. We have a MAJOR problem with that. We have an incumbent-purging, 2008 electoral massacring, banish every war funder into political oblivion problem with that. Does anyone here think it’s time for some sound barrier breaking, White House shaking, Capitol Hill quaking, coast-to-coast America waking, Category FIVE Fucking Anger? I do. Patrick Henry didn't calm down, and I'm not going to either. There. Is. NOTHING. To. Be. Calm. About. from Rusty1776's diary : Betraying our soldiers, our Constitution, and the heritage of representative democracy Americans have died to defend ever since Bunker Hill is hard work, so those empty suits and dresses masquerading as representatives of the American people will be scurrying home for their Memorial Day holiday break. Apparently, they need to indulge themselves in a little rest and relaxation before they scurry back to Washington to pass emergency funding for that Iraq Memorial Wall we're going to need real soon. BREAKING: Halliburton will get the contract and the Bush twins will preside over the dedication of The Wall 2.0 by guzzling a bottle of Jim Beam in a minute flat and then singing the Star Spangled Banner, accompanied by Ann Coulter on air guitar. But I digress . . . Recently, that wild-eyed leftist radical Lee Iacocca asked: "Where are the voices of leaders who can inspire us to action and make us stand taller? What happened to the courageous, populist party of FDR and Truman? There was a time in this country when the voices of great leaders lifted us up and made us want to do better. Where have all the leaders gone?" I can answer that. They’re at Daily Kos and Atrios' Eschaton and Americablog, at Think Progress, Crooks & Liars and TPM Muckraker, at FireDogLake, at Rising Hegemon and at Hullabaloo, at Glenn Greenwald's and Josh Marshall's and at hundreds of other blogs. The voices of leaders who inspire America to action, who make America stand taller, and lift America up can be heard there all day every day. We speak out from our front page, we speak out from our diaries, we speak out from our comment threads, and we are speaking out with one voice today: Pull your complicit heads out of your complicit asses and take a STAND, Democrats. TAKE. A. STAND. Not in September. Not next September. Not on the 50th freaking anniversary of the Commander Guy's codpiece bobbing strut across an aircraft carrier deck to the strains of Hail to the Thief. Take a stand NOW. The streets of Washington are silent, but they won't be silent much longer . . . We are angry, but we need more than anger. Much more. We need leaders who aren't DEAF, DUMB, and BLIND. That would help. We need leaders willing to enforce the Constitution. Yeah, I know, there are still a couple of municipal codes in Bumfuck, Idaho that Bush hasn't violated yet, but they'll be toast by the weekend, so here's a handy number we can all call on Monday: (202) 225-4965. Ask for Nancy. The streets of Washington are silent, but they won't be silent much longer . . . FDR believed "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." This latest Iraq funding fiasco proves the Democratic leadership believes "We have everything to fear, including fear itself." When they finally got done trembling, the Democratic leadership assured us this Iraq supplemental is not a blank check. I can't speak for anyone else here, but if I wanted LIARS representing me I'd have voted Republican last November. You took our money, Democrats. You took our activism. You took our votes. You took our help. Yesterday, you took our faith in you and shit on it. That was not the best idea you've ever had, Democrats. Not that you've had all that many lately. In case you haven't noticed because you've been so busy bending over for Bush, we are the heart, soul, and conscience of this country. We are doctors, we are lawyers, we are teachers, we are students. We are white collar workers and blue collar workers. We are fathers, we are sons, we are mothers, we are daughters. We join together at Kos and Eschaton and Americablog and Think Progress and TPM and Salon and Huffington Post and THE NEW YORK TIMES, from neighborhoods all across America, we are everywhere. We are going to drive you from power, Richard Bruce Cheney and George Walker Bush. We cannot be purged, we cannot be silenced, we cannot be intimidated. We cannot be deleted, retired, or fired. We believe in America. We believe in the truth. We believe in justice. We believe in people power. We believe in each other, even when we disagree. We are defending American democracy and we are going to do that in the streets of Washington if we have to. I'm just one voice here, but if it were up to me, Yearly blog gatherings would be on the South Fucking Lawn of the White House. It's not The Decider's White House, it's every American's White House. It's OUR White House, it's OUR Capitol, it's OUR House and Senate Office Buildings. But they've all been infested with abusers of power, obstructors of justice, taxpayer money stealing criminals and complicit cowards. These people just told us to take a hike. We just might have to do that. A million of us hiking down Pennsylvania Avenue for a week or two would remind those assholes and that smirking sack of shit from Crawford that they work for US. Let the corporate media try not covering THAT. Hi Brian Williams! Vinnie asked us to drop by The Decider's House to say HELLO! Hi Commander Guy! That's a nice crime syndicate you've got going there, it'd be a shame if anything happened to it. Hi Tweety! Hi Pumpkin Head! Hi Mr. Broder! We heard this is YOUR town, but you and your bloody Republican friends have TRASHED the whole place so we came here to CLEAN THINGS UP A BIT. It’s time to take our leadership to the next level, Kossacks, Atriots, Muckrakers, Bloggers, Hegemonians, Progressives, Democrats, Independents, Republicans, Liberals, Moderates, Conservatives, AMERICANS. It’s time to end this nightmare. The streets of Washington are silent, BUT THEY WON'T BE SILENT MUCH LONGER . . .
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Colin Powell's Chief of Staff at the State Department, former Associate Director of Policy Planning at the Department of State, former Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College, and teacher of National Security at the College of William & Mary and George Washington University made the following excerpted remarks:
"U.S. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower thought the 1947 National Security Act was a piece of legislation that was passed by the Congress of the United States, the people's representatives, and that he damn well ought to follow it, and did so probably to an extent that few presidents, if any, have since. The New York Times interviewed me about the detainee abuse issue. I feel so strongly about that issue I talked to the gentleman for about a half an hour. If any of you have any questions on that issue, I'd be glad to address them. For some six years at the Naval War College at Newport and then at the Marine Corps War College at Quantico, I taught some of the brightest people in America, 35- to 40-year-old military officers of all services, both genders, and all professional skills within the services. One of the things I taught them was a very esoteric subject to most of them who were battalion commanders, fighter squadron commanders, destroyer or cruiser captains, or some other really tactical-level position in their service theretofore of 15 in some cases; in other cases, maybe as much as 18 or 20 years. They came to me as tactical experts, as the very best. In most services they were picked out of the top 15 to 20 percent. As I dealt with the national security decision-making process, I had developed a bifurcated view about it. The one side was academic, I had read the 1947 National Security Act that Harry Truman signed on 26 July 1947 and the amendments thereto, and understood that the Goldwater-Nichols Act, the DOD reorganization act, in 1985 I believe it was that actually brought the 1947 act into a new realm, actually closed some gaps that had been in the original act, and created the finest military staff in the world from a staff that theretofore had been a desultory, at best, and put at its head the man who had been the titular boss of the armed forces before, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and made him the principal advisor to the Secretary of Defense, the President of the United States, and the National Security Council.
So this was a monumental change. It was very, very tough to force the armed forces into jointness, which is the jargon that we use to describe it. Today, we desperately need a Goldwater-Nichols Act for the entire federal government. We need to force the interagency process, for example, to conform to President Clinton's PDD-56. It was a document that described very well how America should deal with crisis. The problem was nobody followed it. The problem was nobody followed it to the extent that when a Senate group was set up to investigate that very subject, and called my boss, who was then a private citizen for whom I was working in a private capacity, and said, "Would you come sit on our group? Would you help us with this because we really think the process is broken," my boss' answer was simply, "No, I won't, because you've got it already. You can't improve on what you've got already; you just have to force execution of what you've got." Now there are many critics who will say you cannot, in our system of government, force the executive branch to do something that it doesn't want to do. The framers of the 1947 act I don't think would agree with that. The other reason my views are bifurcated is my practical experience sitting at the right hand of a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a secretary of Defense by the name of Richard Cheney, and watching George Bush Sr. exercise foreign policy. So I've seen that aspect of it. I saw the Clinton administration, up close and personal. I have two approaches, if you will: the academic and the practical. The ground is so rich for an academic and for a person who has taught the National Security Act and what has come out of the National Security Act. As a practitioner and as a citizen of this great Republic, I believe that I have an obligation to say these things, and I believe furthermore that the people's Representatives over on the Hill have truly abandoned their oversight responsibilities in this regard, and have let things atrophy to the point that if we don't do something about it, it's going to get even more dangerous than it already is.
Now when the framers began to think about the 1947 National Security Act, these were probably some people who I think rivaled those who got together that hot summer in Philadelphia and put together the Constitution. We had some really good people thinking hard about these issues. And one of the things that they probably wouldn't tell you if they were here today is that they did not want another Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They even amended the Constitution to make sure they didn't get one for more than eight years. But they didn't want the secrecy, they didn't want the concentration of power, they didn't want the lack of transparency into principal decisions that got people killed, even though they'd been successful in WWII, arguably one of the greatest conflicts the world has seen. And so they set about trying to ensure that this wouldn't happen again. I don't think even his critics would have argued that FDR wasn't a brilliant politician and a brilliant
leader. But let's think about it for a moment as if you are one of the framers of the 1947 National Security Act. How often does America get brilliant leaders? I can count them myself on one hand. So we need a system of checks and balances and institutional fabric that can withstand anybody. It's a real problem in our democracy. You have to have a system that is so elastic, so resilient, so able to take punches that at one time one branch can supplant another, or one branch can come up and check another. It's the old business of checks and balances. If you concentrate power and you do it in a way that is not that different from the way Franklin Roosevelt concentrated it, but you don't have someone who is brilliant at the utilization of that power, you've got problems. You may have problems even if you have someone who is brilliant. Go ask people who've written about Wilson, although I wouldn't say Woodrow Wilson had concentrated power quite the way FDR did. And of course the war and the depression gave him ample opportunity to do things to abridge civil liberties, for example, that even Abraham Lincoln didn't go to in a conflict that produced far more casualties and arguably was more passionately fought, certainly in terms of the families of America. But too much power, too much secrecy; they wanted to get rid of that. They also wanted to institutionalize, more or less, the very thing that had brought about their success in World War II. They wanted to institutional that product, that success, and so they wanted to consolidate the armed forces, they wanted to bring them together. They wanted to put one person in charge of those armed forces.
Talk about secrecy; Harry Truman, when he took over in April of 1945, didn't even know about the atomic bomb. He had had hints because he'd written as chairman of the Investigating Committee in the Senate, to Stimson, and he had said, "I've heard about this land-buying out in Washington; tremendous numbers of acres are being bought. What's going on?" And Stimson had said, "Please, Mr. Senator", essentially, and Truman backed off, to give you a sense of the times and the seriousness of what was happening. But it took Stimson and Leslie Groves, who sneaked in the back door so no one would know he was coming over and George Marshall, who didn't even attend because he was afraid it would bring too much attention to the meeting, and Leslie Groves, Brigadier General Leslie Groves, and Stimson briefed the president with essentially two papers in the Oval Office 12 days after he took office, and he found out exactly how serious this was and exactly what he had to deal with in terms of the nation's nuclear program. So the process these people were going through was to try and make the system more transparent, make decision-making more transparent, make sharing of information and critical data more the likelihood rather than the exception, and they set about doing this through a legislative process. Now, how do you legislate that sort of thing? I heard the same thing about Goldwater-Nichols. I heard the same thing over and over again from my Armed Forces colleagues: you cannot legislate the Armed Forces into being a team. It's impossible, you can't do it. But they did it. They did it, and the people who did it did a fantastic job because they actually went about it in a very concerted, very organized, very disciplined way, and they built the information that they needed in order to make good decisions about how to make the Armed Forces work together. And it involved everything. It involved education, it involved assignments, it involved the professionalism of the forces. It involved almost every aspect of the armed forces that is crucial to building people up into a team, and they enacted it.
I used to use the 1985 committee print from the Senate on civil-military relations as my text for my students because it was such a brilliant exposition of civil-military relations since the beginning of our country. That's how good a job of work they did on that legislation. It was five, six years in the making. It was superb legislation. Can it be perfected even further? Probably so. It was legislation that changed things. We need something like that today. Decisions that send men and women to die, decisions that have the potential to send men and women to die, decisions that confront situations like natural disasters and cause needless death, or cause people to suffer misery that they shouldn't have to suffer, Domestic and International decisions, should not be made in a secret way. All my life I've been taught to guard the nation's secrets. All my life I have followed the rules. I've gone through my special background investigations and all the other things that you need to do, and I understand that the nation's secrets need guarding, but fundamental decisions about foreign policy should not be made in secret. Let me tell you the practical reasons why that's true. You have probably all read books on leadership: If you as a member of a bureaucracy do not participate in a decision, you are not going to carry that decision out with the alacrity, the efficiency and the effectiveness you would if you have participated. When you cut the bureaucracy out of your decisions and then foist your decisions, more or less out of the blue, on that bureaucracy, you can't expect that bureaucracy to carry your decision out very well. And furthermore, if you're not prepared to stop the feuding elements in that bureaucracy as they carry out your decision, you're courting disaster, and I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran. With regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita, and I could go on back, we haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is even more serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence. Read it again sometime. Read in there what the founders say about the necessity of the people to throw off tyranny or to throw off ineptitude or to throw off that which is not doing what the people want it to do. We are talking about the potential for, I think, very dangerous times if we don't get our act together.
Almost everyone since the '47 act, with the exception, I think, of Eisenhower, has in some way or another perturbated or flummoxed the National Security decision-making process. John Kennedy trusted his brother as attorney general more than he should have. Richard Nixon took a position that was not even envisioned by the original framers of the act's minds, national security advisor not subject to confirmation by the Senate or advice and consent and gave it to his Secretary of State, concentrating power in ways that still reverberate in this country. Jimmy Carter allowed Zbignew Brzezinski to essentially negate his secretary of State. I could go on and say what Sandy Berger did to Madeline Albright in the realm of foreign policy, and make other provocative statements too, but no one, in my study of the act's implementation, has so flummoxed the process as the present administration. What do I mean by that? Remember what I said about the bureaucracy, if it's going to implement your decisions, having to participate in those decisions? Let me add one other dimension to that. The complexity of crises that confront governments today is just unprecedented. At the same time, especially in America, but I submit to you in Japan, in China, and in a number of other countries, it's just as bad, if not in some ways worse, the complexity of governing is unprecedented. You simply cannot deal with all the challenges that government has to deal with, meet all the demands that government has to meet in the modern age, in the 21st century, without admitting that it is hugely complex. That doesn't mean you have to add a Department of Homeland Security with 70,000 disparate entities thrown under somebody in order to handle them, but it does mean that your bureaucracy has got to be staffed with good people, and they've got to work together, and they've got to work under leadership they trust and leadership that on basic issues they agree with, and that if they don't agree, they can dissent and dissent and dissent. And if their dissent is such that they feel so passionate about it, they can resign and know why they're resigning, but that is not the case today. The case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations and changes to the National Security decision-making process.
What I saw was a cabal between Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld on critical issues that made decisions the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in a such a disjointed and incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn't know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out. If you want to read how the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal flummoxed the process, read George Packer's book, "The Assassin's Gate," if you haven't already. Of course there are other names in there: Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, whom Tommy Franks said was the stupidest man in the world. He was. Let me testify to that. He was. Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man. And yet, after the Secretary of State agrees to a $40 billion department rather than a $30 billion department having control, at least in the immediate post-war period in Iraq, this man is put in charge. Not only is he put in charge, he is given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw itself in a closet somewhere. Now, that's not making excuses for the State Department; that's telling you how decisions were made and telling you how things were done. Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address specifically warned us of the dangers of the Military-Industrial complex, and don't you think they aren't among us today in a concentration of power that is just unparalleled. It all happened because of the end of the Cold War. How many contractors who did billion dollars or so business with the Defense Department did we have in 1988 and how many do we have now? And they're always working together. They're in every state. They've got every Congressman, every Senator. It's something we should be looking at. You've got this collegiality there between the Secretary of Defense and the Vice President, and you've got a President who is not versed in International Relations and not too much interested in them either. And so it's not too difficult to make decisions in this Oval Office cabal, and decisions often that are the opposite of what you'd thought were made in the formal process.
Now, let's get back to Dr. Rice again. For so long I said to Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage, it is a dysfunctional process. And to myself I said, who's causing this? Well, the National Security Adviser. Even if the framers didn't envision that position, even if it's not subject to confirmation by the Senate, the National Security Advisor should be doing a better job. Now I've come to a different conclusion, and after reading Packer's book I found additional confirmation that it was more a case of real dysfunctionality. Rice made a decision that she would side with Bush to build her intimacy with the president. And so what we had was a situation where the position of National Security Advisor, seen in the evolution over some half-century, who is supposed to act as the balancer, or the person who would make sure all opinions got to the President, the person who would make sure that every dissent that made sense got to the President, actually was a part of the problem, and on many issues sided with the President, and the Vice President, and the Secretary of Defense. And so what you had again was this incredible formal process, the Statutory Process, the Policy Coordinating Committee, the Deputies Committee, the Principal's Committee, all camouflaging the dysfunctionality, and camouflaging the efficiency of the actual secret decision-making process. And so we got into Iraq. George Packer quotes Richard Haas in his book as saying, "To this day I still don't know why we went to war in Iraq." I can go through all the things we listed, from WMD to human rights to terrorism, but I really can't sit here and tell you why we went to war in Iraq. And there are so many critical decisions like this. Why did we wait three years to talk to the North Koreans? Why did we wait four-plus years to say we at least back the EU-3 approach to Iran? Why did we create the National Director of Intelligence and add further to the bureaucracy, which was what caused the problem in the first place?
The problem is in not sharing information. The problem is not that we don't have enough feet on the ground or enough people collecting intelligence or enough $40 billion eyes in the sky national technical means. That's not the problem. The problem is our people don't share. The problem is the FBI is over here in its niche, and the CIA is over here, and INR is here, and Treasury is here, and the DIA is here, and the NSA is here, and the NRO is here, and god almighty, they never talk to each other. They don't share. They don't pass information around. They don't work in the same cultures. They don't have the same attitude about the information they're handling, sometimes for very good and extremely important Constitutional reasons. Some are domestic law enforcement; some are not. There are all kinds of problems that need to be dealt with, but we are not going to make it into the 21st century very far and keep our power intact and our powder dry if we don't start to deal with this need to change the decision-making process, and an understanding of how Cheney and Bush and their administration suddenly concentrated power in one tiny little aspect of the Federal Government, and let that little cabal make the decisions. That's not a recipe for success. It's a recipe for the speed and alacrity with which you can make decisions, but if all of you bring something to the fight and will be integral in the implementation of the decision I'm going to make, and if you know some things I don't know and you might dissent because of those things you know, I damn well better listen to you, and I better figure out a way to get all of you to work together if we come to a decision and decide to implement that. That is not what this administration did for four years. Instead it made decisions in secret, and it is paying the consequences of having made those decisions in secret, but far more telling is that America is paying the consequences. You and I and every other citizen is paying the consequences, whether it is the lack of response to Katrina or the situation in Iraq. Winston Churchill said, "America will always do the right thing, after exhausting all other possibilities." We need to get busy and do the right thing. So why not get it right now? I don't see any signs, other than signs of desperation, that is to say, the polls are falling, people are finally listening, to a certain extent, to the evidence that's building up, and so people are getting desperate. And so Dr. Rice gets some more flexibility, some more leeway, and we do this and we do that; that looks diplomatic. But I don't see anything that looks coordinated because the decisions are still being made essentially in that small group.
The detainee abuse issue is a concrete example of what I've just described that we are going to be ashamed of. We need to say to the American people, this is not us, this is not the way we do business in the world. Of course in our history we have had people who violate the law of war, but I don't think we've ever had a Presidential involvement, a Secretarial involvement, a Vice-Presidential involvement, an Attorney General involvement in telling our troops, essentially, carte blanche is the way you should feel, you should not have any qualms because this is a different kind of conflict. I'm a former military man, 31 years in the Army. So I understand the change in the nature of our enemy, but that doesn't mean we make a change in the nature of America. But that's exactly what we did, and we did it in secret. We did it in such serecy that the secretary of State came through my door one day and said, Larry, get everything, get all the paperwork, get the ICRC reports, get everything; I think this is going to be a real mess. And Will Taft, his lawyer, got the same instruction from a legal point of view. Will and I worked together for almost a year as the ICRC reports began to build and come in, and Kellenberger even came in and visited with the secretary of State. And we knew that things weren't the way they should be, and as former soldiers, we knew that you don't have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you've condoned it. Whether you did it explicitly or not is irrelevant. If you did it at all, indirectly, implicitly, tacitly, pick the word, you're in trouble because that slope is truly slippery, and it will take years to reverse the situation, and we'll probably have to grow a new military. We may have to do that anyway because my army right now is truly in bad shape, and I'm not talking about the billions and billions of dollars of equipment burning up in Iraq at a rate 10 or 15 times the rate its life cycle, I'm also talking about when you have officers who have to hedge the truth, NCOs who have to hedge the truth. They start voting with their feet, as they did in Vietnam, my war. They come home and they tell their wife they've got to go back for the third tour and the fourth tour and the wife says no, or the husband says no, and all of a sudden your military begins to unravel.
The signs are very concrete right now that the Army and the Marine Corps, and to a lesser extent the other services because they're not quite as involved, that real problems are brewing. We need to craft a piece of legislation that does for the Federal bureaucracy what we did for the Armed Forces. We have got to do better than we're doing today. We need people on the Hill who will accept the challenge of reformatting and reorganizing the interagency process of our Federal bureaucracy to meet the challenges of the 21st century, and we must investigate and then do a major revision of our own processes. I feel as a citizen and as a person very much concerned with the military I need to speak out. If you're going to exercise diligent oversight, then you better damn well have your own act together in terms of exercising that oversight. So Congress needs to reorganize. The executive branch is not organized optimally either, and I'm not sure the State Department even exists anymore except in the minds of the Foreign Service. Yes, we have embassies around the world, and if you've been to one lately you know they look like concertina-wired Abu Ghraibs. They send a terrible signal. I was in one in Honduras that just...I'm not sure the State Department is effective anymore. Maybe the Congress realizes that and that's the reason their budget is so low, that's the reason they're so small. And with our current foreign policy, I'm not sure you can get around the non-utility of the State Department, so I would seek a way to revitalize what I call the diplomatic instrument. And it's not just money. We really need to take a look at the national security advisor position. It's not a position that was envisioned by the framers. It's a position that has become immensely powerful. It's a position that's very personal. It's a position that is very difficult to get the executive branch to subject to the advice and consent of the Senate. We need to take a look at that, and protect ourselves against institutional imperfections, and in particular we have to protect ourselves against the imperfections that humans bring, and the way you do that is with firm laws.
Contrary to what you were hearing in the papers and other places, one of the best relationships we had in fighting terrorists and in intelligence in general was with the French. In fact, it was probably the best. There's a huge difference between diplomacy conducted with all the parties that might be impacted by the results of that diplomacy and a decision being made and foisted on the world. Kim Campbell, the former Canadian Prime Minister, at a panel we had said, we're not anti-American, we're scared; we're scared to death the giant has no head. You're in the world and you have no head. When you put your feet up on a hassock and look at a man who's won the Nobel Prize and is currently the president of South Korea, and tell him in a very insulting way that you don't agree with his assessment of what's necessary to be reconciled with the north, that's not diplomacy, that's cowboyism. I went to high school in Houston and I've got some connections with Texas. But there's just a vast difference in the way we conduct diplomacy today. It's gracelessness. Grace is something we have lost in the modern world, but it very important. It's very different, for example, to walk in with a foreign leader and find something you can be magnanimous about. You don't have to win everything. You don't have to be the big bully on the block. Find something you can be magnanimous about, that you can give him, that you can say he gets credit for, or she gets credit for. That's diplomacy. You don't walk in and say, I'm the big mother on the block and if everybody's not with me, they're against me, etc etc etc. Alot of Cheney and Bush's decisions reflect their connections with the cartels and the corporations and so forth, and they have brought this sort of idea that the bottom line is everything. I will tell you, as a military man, the bottom line is not everything. It's far from everything. When you start treating the military like a businessman would his business, you are damaging and perhaps destroying the potential of that military to win future conflicts.
- Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Colin Powell's Chief of Staff at the State Department, former Associate Director of Policy Planning at the Department of State, former Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College, and teacher of National Security at the College of William & Mary and George Washington University.
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