And I don't take very seriously the media or the press in this country, who in the case of the Persian Gulf War were nothing more than unpaid employees of the Department of Defense, and who most of the time...
I'm sorry, I hate to do it.
It's so hard to turn this stuff down, but we've got to get on with the show.
I'll try to stay on and play some more Carlin for you later on.
It's anti-war radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
Our first guest today is Melvin A. Goodman.
He's a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and an adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.
He has more than 40 years of experience in the CIA, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the Department of Defense.
He's the author or co-author of six books, including Bush League Diplomacy, How the Neoconservatives Are Putting the World at Risk, and The Phantom Defense, America's Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion, 2001.
Wow, that one sounds interesting.
The new one, the one I have here, Failure of Intelligence, The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Thank you, Scott.
Good to be with you.
It's very good to have you on the show here.
I like this book.
I could tell right away that this wasn't going to be a bunch of propaganda shoved down my throat.
I could tell the way you address the axis of evil countries and your perspective on the Iranian nuclear program and so forth.
I could tell that this is the kind of thing I was going to enjoy, and it turns out I was right.
I learned a lot of history, and I guess if there's a villain in your book, it's Robert Gates, the current Secretary of Defense.
This is the poster boy for everything wrong with central intelligence nowadays.
It's everything that's wrong about central intelligence, and also everything that's wrong about congressional oversight, because once again the Congress wasn't doing its job.
They confirmed Bob Gates as CIA director in 1991, even though four years earlier they denied him confirmation because they knew he was lying about Iran-Contra, and the chairman of the committee, David Boren, called him at home and told him he was lying, and the committee basically did not believe him.
But somehow these people managed to launder their credentials.
There's never any accountability.
There's rarely accountability at the CIA, and that's why we're in this fix that we're in.
The Congress doesn't do its job.
The print media don't call attention to it.
The public remains asleep on most of these issues, and now we have a disaster in Iraq that was brought to us essentially by flawed intelligence, false intelligence.
Well, there's a couple different angles I could go there.
I want to stick with Robert Gates for a minute.
There are people who say now that he's really the voice of reason in the administration.
He's the only one who has the gravitas or whatever to stand up to Dick Cheney in front of George Bush.
Do you buy that?
No, I don't.
To me, that's a statement that reflects how low the Bush administration has sunk, that Bob Gates is the great white hope of the Bush administration.
Because if you have a character as flawed as Bob Gates, who believes in the war in Iraq, and who says we must win the war in Iraq, and has now endorsed as many troops, or actually more troops, than we had in Iraq when we went into the country five years ago in 2003, and who really hasn't made any changes in the acquisitions process in the Pentagon, which is totally flawed, then how in the world does this man become the best side of the Bush administration?
The irony to me in all of this is that the reason why Donald Rumsfeld helped be booted out of his position in December of 2006 or November of 2006 was he had really lost fervor with regard to the war in Iraq.
So they had to bring in a fresher face who believed in the war.
This is the same thing Lyndon Johnson did after the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, because Robert McNamara realized the war could not be won, so they brought in Clark Clifford to engage the war.
Of course, Clark Clifford was also turned when he saw the evidence.
But again, Bob Gates in 2006 was brought in because Donald Rumsfeld had lost his enthusiasm for this war.
So now we have a war that this administration believes you can win and wants to win, and we have a presidential candidate such as John McCain who also wants to win the war, a war that's already been lost, but that's another matter, and is prepared to stay there 100 years.
So is Bob Gates from everything he has said.
Well, and I think that's a very important point.
You and, I guess, Robert Perry are the only people I've ever heard say that, besides myself, pointed out that it was Rumsfeld who was saying, now look, wait a minute, maybe we need to think of this like a welfare program, and the more dependent on us they are, the less they're going to get their act together themselves, and maybe we really need to start withdrawing our forces.
That was when they booted him, and he started to sound reasonable.
Exactly.
Donald Rumsfeld asked his high-ranking generals at the Pentagon, are we creating more terrorists, or are we capturing and killing more terrorists?
And I think when the answer came back, it was obvious that we were creating more terrorists with our tactics.
In Iraq, so Rumsfeld knew this was a war that could never be won.
And actually, having taught at the National War College, and taught military doctrine to this group of military officers, that includes the current chairman of the National Intelligence Community, and now the new Air Force Chief of Staff, we taught, and they understood, that this war has passed.
It's what Klausowitz called the gravitational point of war.
The war has been lost.
So you're saying that you taught Mike McConnell?
Mike McConnell was a student of mine at the National War College in the 1990s.
Norton Schwartz, the new Air Force Chief of Staff and head of the Transportation Command, was a student of mine at the National War College in the 1990s.
And it's kind of interesting to see these people take over key positions who learn one thing, and profess to learn some lessons about war and the constraints on military force, and now they're in the position because, frankly, because of civilians, not because of military leaders.
Military leaders don't take us into war.
Usually the wars that we select by choice, like Vietnam and Iraq, these are the classic situations that civilians take us into, what David Halberstam called in that wonderful book, The Best and the Brightest.
It's the best and the brightest who took us into Vietnam, took us into Iraq, and of course it's the military, which I think has been derelict in terms of what its obligations were that have gone along with these flawed decisions.
Boy, and that really says something about the state of America's role in the world now, and the role of foreign policy in our domestic life, even, that the biggest fear of the Founding Fathers, a permanent standing army that would always have the incentive to find excuses for putting itself to work, is actually, hopefully, the restraining force on the power-mad crazies from the think tanks.
Exactly, but it also brings to mind something that President Eisenhower said in 1961 in his farewell address, the warning about the military-industrial complex, which was essentially a civilian complex, not a uniform military complex, but it has come true in terms of this reality in which this military-industrial complex is now more powerful and more threatening than anything I think even Eisenhower could have imagined.
What a new president is going to have to deal with, and it really doesn't matter whether it's Obama or McCain, is the fact that national security is now dominated by the Pentagon.
The Pentagon is dominated by a figure such as Robert Gates, who falsified intelligence on the Soviet Union in the 1980s that led to the great intelligence failure of 1991, and now, ironically, he's commanding a war that we entered because of falsified intelligence, and you have a State Department that basically sunk into a kind of obscurity and a phantom state in which the State Department really has no impact whatsoever.
In your book, Mel, it basically seems like the stories of this or that group of analysts stood up and told the truth to the White House are simply the exceptions that prove the rule, that is, that all this intelligence is simply there to help lie the country into whatever it is that the policymakers want.
Well, right, and it's a two-sided coin.
The people who stand up with a moral compass and try to tell truth to power are pushed aside and marginalized, and those people who are corrupt, and my perfect example is the speech that the CIA wrote for Colin Powell that was given to the United Nations in February of 2003 to make the case to the international community for going to war.
That was a totally flawed speech.
It had 28 allegations.
All were false.
All were shown to be false and demonstrated to be false, sometimes immediately or certainly within a year after we entered the war.
Not one person at the CIA, whether it was the director, the deputy director, the head of the intelligence directorate, no one suffered any negative consequences for taking part in this phony exercise that put Colin Powell out there where he should never have been.
He should have resigned, but that's another matter, but put him out there where the country lost all of its credibility internationally because it made a case for war that was shown to be totally flawed and specious.
Yeah, well, now, to even call it flawed intelligence to me is flawed intelligence.
I mean, these guys were prepared to certify that Iraq was weapons of mass destruction free in 1997, and then Madeleine Albright preempted that by announcing that the sanctions would never be lifted no matter what anyway, etc., and they knew that every bit of this was a pack of lies.
This wasn't flawed intelligence.
They decided they wanted to believe Curveball and Ahmed Chalabi.
Oh, I totally agree with you.
In fact, the irony is if you look at the major intelligence failures of the past 20 years, that would be the Soviet Union, the 9-11 intelligence failure, and the Iraq war.
In each and every case, we had the collection there to prevent failure, but as you say, these were people who wanted to give an answer to the administration that the administration wanted.
In the case of the Soviet Union, they wanted to be able to tell Ronald Reagan, yes, the Soviet Union, that there is 10 feet tall, and in the case of the Iraq war, they wanted to tell a president the great words of George Tenet, this would be a slam dunk, Mr. President, to give you this phony intelligence, which is exactly what they did and took this country into war.
I think Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were determined to go to war regardless of what the intelligence said, but the fact is the CIA made it a lot easier for them by going to the Congress, which essentially was a pushover given the fact that there's never been an act of real spine in terms of a resolute Congress over the last several years.
They were pushed over by this CIA intelligence.
A friend sent me an article the other day by James Rison, and it was about the neocons, particularly Douglas Fyfe and Richard Perl, and I don't know if Wormster's in there or not.
Libby is, certainly.
I saw the piece.
Oh, you saw the piece.
There you go.
And they're complaining that, no fair, you know, the CIA and the State Department got to trash us for years without us really being able to fight back, as though they don't have the weekly standard in the National Review, I guess, the Wall Street Journal.
But anyway, it's just not true that it's all the neocons' fault, because, after all, we'd sit there and tell Bush that Saddam Hussein was in league with Mohammed Attah or whatever, and the CIA and the State Department would sit there and say nothing.
And they never stood up to us on our lies, so therefore they're just as guilty as we are, and I have to admit that it seems like he's got a point there.
Well, he does and he doesn't.
In some cases they did stand up.
On the links to terrorism, which was really a Pentagon creation, this was the opposite of special plans that Douglas Feith ran over at the Pentagon, that not only collected phony intelligence, but then distributed it to the White House, which was a violation of the charter of the Pentagon.
The CIA made it clear they didn't have evidence of such linkage, but then George Tenet himself wrote a letter to the chairman, then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham, saying there was intelligence.
Well, he didn't say, yes, there was intelligence, but it was bad intelligence, but it was forged intelligence that talked about such links.
But you're right, in a lot of issues they didn't stand up.
On the curveball thing, the mobile biological labs, they didn't stand up, but the State Department did.
On the aluminum tube issue, whether these were for rockets or for conventional artillery, the evidence was clear they were for conventional artillery.
Saddam Hussein didn't even buy this stuff secretly.
He bought it in open markets with open documentation.
Everyone knew this was the Italian 81-millimeter Medusa rocket that they had created.
It was for his conventional program.
It was legal by all of the U.N. sanctions.
He could engage in this activity.
But even Colin Powell went along with this military weapon as something for strategic arms.
So there was a lot of fraud that was going on within the intelligence community.
But as the Senate Intelligence Committee established a couple weeks ago in a report that most people just totally ignored, and the print media, again, totally ignored, the Senate Intelligence Committee finally released its report on how the Bush administration falsified the intelligence that it was given by the CIA.
Granted, they weren't given good intelligence to begin with, but in each and every case they made it worse.
And particularly when you look at the argument that was used by Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld and even George Bush that the mushroom clout should not be a smoking gun, there was no evidence of a nuclear weapons program.
In Iraq, this was well known to the Department of Energy.
It was well known to the State Department's intelligence and research.
And it was even well known to the Air Force.
So the CIA really was corrupting some of the intelligence in this case, too.
Now, one thing that you mentioned about the Pentagon's growth in power reminded me of that Seymour Hersh article, The Coming War is What the Pentagon Can Now Do in Secret, where it seems like in the intra-governmental fighting or what have you that the Pentagon or the Vice President's office decided they wanted to punish the CIA.
And so they used the phony 9-11 Commission as the pressure from below to get the National Intelligence Director seat created, basically, and make the CIA Director simply the CIA Director, not the Director of Central Intelligence overall anymore, and to punish the CIA.
And then it seems like turnover, more and more covert activities to the military who don't even have to bother showing up at John Rockefeller's committee there.
Well, I think we always had the Pentagon's de facto control of the intelligence community.
The intelligence community budget, for example, is a secret budget that's buried inside the Pentagon's budget.
So the Pentagon controls about 85 to 90 percent of the budget.
And if you look at the personnel of the intelligence community, they're 85 to 90 percent of the personnel really report to the Pentagon.
They're either uniformed members of the services or they're Defense Department officials.
But now with the Pentagon's pressure, and Rumsfeld had a lot to do with this, to create a Department of National Intelligence under a retired now three-star Navy admiral, this meant that in terms of mission and charter, the Pentagon really runs the intelligence community.
And even the new appointment of an Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, which was created by Rumsfeld in the early first Bush administration, but he appointed a civilian.
Bob Gates came along and appointed a retired three-star general to run this position.
So if you look around the intelligence community, you have Michael Hayden, a four-star general, the Director of National Intelligence, a retired three-star admiral, the top leaders of the National Counterterrorism Center, active duty and retired admirals, the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, a retired three-star general.
The military runs the intelligence community, and this is exactly what Harry Truman didn't want when he created the CIA and the intelligence community about 60 years ago in the National Security Act of 1947.
He said it should be outside the policy process.
Well, not only has it been brought into the tent of policy, but it's the Pentagon's tent that is running this show in terms of budget, personnel, and basically the major missions of the intelligence community.
And this is wrong.
This is going to produce bad intelligence, and it's going to produce not the kind of important strategic intelligence that we need to avoid blunders like Vietnam and the Iraq War.
Well, and it does mean that they don't have to show up at John Rockefeller's committee to explain what they're doing, right?
No, nothing gets explained, and there's really no accountability, but I blame basically the Senate Intelligence Committee for that, because when those oversight committees were created in 1975, 1976, by Senator Frank Church of Idaho and Congressman Otis Pike of New York, it was to provide genuine, rigorous, and tenacious oversight of these secret agencies.
And you can't have secret agencies running around in a democratic society.
They can undercut your democracy, and we're seeing that.
And look, in the last few years, certainly since 9-11, look at the CIA role in torture and abuse, secret prisons, extraordinary renditions.
These are crimes, and eventually the Supreme Court is moving toward decisions that I think will establish these activities as crimes.
There needs to be accountability.
These are war crimes as far as I'm concerned when you look at torture and abuse and secret prisons.
But again, there's been no accountability in this area.
I actually want to play a clip for you here.
Somebody stopped by my blog and dropped this off yesterday, a guy named Charles Davis.
He just, I guess, walked up to Jay Rockefeller with a tape recorder.
The date on this is April 18th of last year, and this is just 40 seconds long here.
And the question, let me set this up correctly because I edited it down.
The question is about the Brian Ross report about American support for the al-Qaeda-like terrorist group Jandala in Pakistan for use against Iranians.
Of course, they're back in the news for murdering some Iranian police over the weekend.
Here is John Rockefeller's response.
Is there anything that you could do in your position as chairman of the Intelligence Committee to maybe find answers about this, if it is in fact going on?
Don't you understand the way intelligence works?
Do you think that because I'm chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say I want it and give it to me?
They control all of it, all of it, all the time.
I only get, and my committee only gets, what they want to give me.
Is there any way, maybe not you, but somehow, if they can press the administration to find something, if it may be illegal, are there any ways to find out?
I don't know that.
I deal with intelligence.
That's it.
They tend to avoid us.
Wow.
I've never heard that before.
That is unbelievable.
There you go.
He has the power of subpoena.
He has the power of investigation.
He has the power of the purse.
They have a chop on the CIA budget.
They have a chop on the CIA director, the CIA deputy director, the CIA inspector general, to stand up before anyone, and I don't know who Charles Davis is, but I want to thank him for that exchange, and to say I have no control over any of this is unbelievable.
Did this ever get into the news media?
No, no, this is just a small thing on a blog.
This is on a blog?
Yeah.
I'll send you the link, actually, after the show to the guy's blog.
Please do.
Because I'm doing an update.
My book is about to sell out.
It's going to go into paperback at the end of the year, and I want to get that into the updated paperback edition.
Yeah.
Well, that really is the problem when you're turning to John D. Rockefeller IV to be the protector of the little guy in this country.
I mean, give us a break.
Here in the house we have Sylvester Reyes, and a reporter cornered him and said, all right, what's the difference between Hezbollah and al-Qaeda?
And he said, oh, man, I don't know.
Why do you have to ask me this on a Friday when I'm going home?
Well, you know, I blame Nancy Pelosi for that appointment.
I wasn't a big fan of Jane Harman, but she was a hell of a lot more tenacious and rigorous and intelligent than Reyes.
Yeah, the problem was she was under investigation for ties to AIPAC, right?
Pardon?
Well, the problem was she was under criminal investigation for her ties to the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee.
Yeah, that I wasn't aware of.
I thought it was just a rivalry between Pelosi and Harman with their bases in Northern California and Southern California.
That was the determinant.
But clearly, whatever the reason was, she's clearly weak in the House Intelligence Committee.
And frankly, if you look at Pelosi, she sat in on all the special briefings the CIA gave about torture, abuse, and secret prisons.
She knew about this activity.
She never raised any reservation whatsoever, let alone complained.
Now, Jay Rockefeller did write a letter, a letter that he claimed he couldn't declassify as if the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman doesn't have the ability to classify and declassify documents that he has written himself.
So, again, the constitutional crisis that we're dealing with in this country is immense.
But basically, for my traveling around the country, and I was in Texas a couple weeks ago, the country is asleep on these issues.
Yeah, it does seem like, well, like in the Haditha case, right?
The more they tell us, the less most people want to hear it.
Exactly.
I think part of the problem here is that we have a professional military, which allows the people of this country to say, hey, we have a professional military that fights our wars.
That is essentially not my concern.
And that's why there's no anti-war movement in this country.
You hear about torture and abuse in Abu Ghraib, but no one gets motivated by such unconscionable behavior.
You have public officials who justify torture and abuse.
We now know, thanks to The New York Times, about a CIA lawyer who said if a detainee is tortured and he dies, it's because we haven't conducted the torture properly.
Right.
It's just unbelievable the kinds of activities we're seeing sanctioned by our government, in our name, the name of the American people.
Well, you know, you talk about the rendition program in your book, the widespread kidnapping of people from around the world, the ghost prisons in that former Soviet gulags in Romania and Poland, in Thailand, ships at sea and God knows where.
And the effect that this has, the blowback, that's what you CIA analyst professional types call it, right?
The consequences of covert action.
Exactly.
And another thing that it does cause is there are countries now that don't want to cooperate with us.
And if you look at that, every al-Qaeda captive that we have had and every al-Qaeda leader who we've managed to capture or to kill in some fashion, all of that was done with foreign intelligence liaison.
We didn't have the lead on these situations.
It came to us from tips from Pakistan, from Saudi Arabia, and Syria.
But now because of a lot of these activities that include, as you say, we give them names like renditions.
These are kidnappings.
These are kidnappings of people off the street, in some cases Europe.
There's a trial going on now in Italy of 24 CIA agents, including the chief of station in Rome and the chief of base in Milan, for kidnapping a cleric, sending him to Egypt where he was tortured, without any real evidence about what this guy was doing, what was his involvement with terrorism.
And, again, if you look at Guantanamo, where now there are still several hundred prisoners in Guantanamo, how many are innocent?
The overwhelming majority appear to be innocent of any activity whatsoever, but they can't even present their case.
We don't know any of this material.
Their lawyers can't get evidence.
And it's now taken the Supreme Court five years, but they're moving toward recognizing habeas corpus for these people.
But will it change anything over the long run?
And, granted, to go back to Bob Gates when we started the show, he is foreclosing Guantanamo and moving these people to the United States where they should be at U.S. facilities.
But Dick Cheney has clearly blocked that, so Condoleezza Rice and Bob Gates and their efforts to close Guantanamo have really gone for naught.
Well, and the ghost prisons, too.
I guess they brought Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a few others and said, okay, we closed them all and we're bringing them to Guantanamo, but then there are still reports about ghost prisons around the world.
Do you know the status of how many there are or anything like that?
The problem is I just don't think we know.
Now, we know there are still secret prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I think they've closed down the ones in Eastern Europe, Poland, Romania, probably Bulgaria, but I'm not sure of the third country.
We had secret prisons in Thailand.
We were using British facilities in Diego Garcia.
You referred to ships that were used for prisoners, and I think we've stopped doing that.
But we don't know about the facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we know there was one CIA prison that was built for millions of dollars in Afghanistan, but when the heat became intense on these issues, they just abandoned this facility.
So somewhere in Afghanistan we have built a modern penal colony or institution that for all we know is now the headquarters for the Taliban.
I mean, we don't know where this facility is.
We know it costs millions of dollars.
We don't know who's using it.
We know that we've abandoned it.
So there are all kinds of activities going on that we really know nothing about, and then you get into the work of contractors and the involvement of contractors and interrogators and the lack of any accountability for these contractors.
We already know about the Blackwater scandals, but Blackwater, after a period of four or five months, after they killed about 17 innocent Iraqi civilians, all those contracts have been renewed by Condoleezza Rice at the State Department.
So they're into the U.S. government for hundreds of millions of dollars as Blackwater is on their way to create probably one of the largest armies in the world, as well as building military facilities in this country, particularly in North Carolina and South Carolina and out west, that are huge military bases and huge military operations.
And again, if the Congress isn't going to pursue this, and despite what Rockefeller says, they have the subpoena power to do so, we, the American people, are going to find out nothing about this activity.
So we're really relying on a couple people like Mosquet Hill, who's written a wonderful book on Blackwater.
You mentioned Bob Perry, who's kept the heat on Bob Gates and the Pentagon.
Thank goodness for Seymour Hersh, who in some ways is our only genuine day-to-day investigative reporter and has been for the last 30 or 40 years.
The work that you do and the work that several of us try to do, there's really a small number of people, and they tend to get marginalized by the big print media institutions of this country.
Well, now the work I do doesn't count for much.
I hope you don't have me confused with the real Scott Horton over there at Harper's Magazine.
He's the one who deserves the credit.
Well, you've got a show and you've got an antiwar.com site.
You deserve some.
Well, we're trying here, we're trying.
There's so many things on my page of notes here, it's really incredible.
One thing, this is apropos of nothing, but you write in your book that the CIA wittingly, I love the term wittingly, it's almost never used without the un in front of it, the CIA wittingly gave what they knew to be Soviet double agent defective intelligence to the White House in the 1980s and even into the 1990s?
Exactly, as late as the first year of the Bill Clinton administration.
This was after the Aldrich James scandal, which was an incredibly systemic institutional failure on the part of the CIA, and that he was permitted to spy for the Soviet Union for nearly a decade, despite the concerns of some of the operational people who I knew at the CIA at the time.
What James was able to do was give information to the Soviets that allowed the Soviets to shut down every operation, every collection operation that the CIA had against the Soviet Union.
So when we started collecting intelligence, we knew this was intelligence from double agents.
This was stuff that was given to us because the KGB wanted us to have the material, and we still sent these reports into the White House, and Bob Gates was doing so as CIA director, and that brief period from November 1991 to January 1993, when he was indeed the CIA director because of the Senate confirmation of Bob Gates.
And this led to no consequences whatsoever, and if you look at the CIA Inspector General's report, this was Fred Hitz, who was the IG at the time, he said there was no institutional failure at the CIA during the Ames affair, no systemic breakdown during the Ames affair.
That's unbelievable to me.
Sounds like maybe he was working for the Reds, too.
You say in the book, too, that Robert Gates, who had helped Bill Casey blow the Soviet Union all out of proportion during the 1980s, he was actually in the middle of his confirmation hearings when the Soviet Union fell apart in December 1991.
Yeah, it's kind of ironic that the guy who was trying to make the Russian bear look taller than anyone else in this country took the entire period of time that the CIA was collapsing to gain its confirmation, so by the time he came to the CIA and got with confirmation, it was November, and of course in December the Soviet Union was gone.
It was literally history as Boris Yeltsin brought down the Soviet Union in what was essentially a constitutional coup.
So Bob Gates, who kept singing the praises of the power of the Soviet Union and the threat of the Soviet Union and the ominous nature of the Soviet Union, he was sitting essentially in the halls of Congress trying to defend these views while the Soviet Union was coming apart like a house of cards because, as several of us were saying at the CIA at the time, including myself, the CIA was indeed a house of cards.
That's why it collapsed like a house of cards.
All right, now we've only got three minutes to talk about the entire war on terrorism.
Sound good?
What's your assessment of al-Qaeda?
I just read this great article by Peter Bergen and another guy in The Independent, and he's, of course, interviewed Osama bin Laden and is truly an expert.
This article is saying, you know, these guys have a lot of blowback to suffer from themselves.
They've killed a lot of Muslim civilians over the past few years, and a lot of people are sick and tired of it, including people who used to support the al-Qaeda movement.
You know, it seems to me like maybe the 9-11 attacks, as John Mueller put it in his book, Overblown, rather than being the cutting edge, the vanguard of this giant Islamo-fascist caliphate, this was really a last gasp, a Hail Mary attempt on the part of Osama bin Laden to bring America into the Middle East in order to, well, the Ledeen Doctrine, right, the boiling cauldron in order to stir everything up.
And I just wonder what you think, now I've taken up a minute of your answer time with my question, I wonder what you think can be done about the war on terrorism in a minimalist fashion so that we don't have to continue down this road.
Well, I think two things are important.
One, I do believe that 9-11 was the beginning of the end for bin Laden, and once we get this into some kind of a historical perspective, we'll see that terrorism is not an existential threat to the United States.
We can deal with terrorism.
And then bin Laden actually made a huge mistake when he attacked the United States on 9-11 because he was essentially routed at the time.
And the national organization or the international capabilities of al-Qaeda are not what they used to be.
They could not pull off the complicated international operations such as 9-11.
But the lesson we haven't learned, and this helps al-Qaeda and bin Laden immensely, is that you can't fight terrorism with military policy.
I think the British learned in dealing with the IRA that it takes police work, it takes intelligence work, it takes international liaison and effective cooperation by both intelligence officers and police officers to deal with terrorism.
And the big mistake we made was abandoning the struggle against Afghanistan and al-Qaeda in 2001 to go into war against Iraq and that self-fulfilling prophecy that Bush made when he talked about Iraq as the center against terrorism.
Well, Iraq wasn't involved in terrorism.
Saddam Hussein didn't permit terrorists.
He didn't permit al-Qaeda in his country before we entered the country.
So we have created the opportunity for the real threat from al-Qaeda, which is not al-Qaeda itself or bin Laden.
It's these copycat al-Qaeda groups that you have in Algeria and Morocco and Indonesia and the Philippines.
But even there, we've had some serious successes with regard to al-Qaeda, successes in Indonesia, successes in the Philippines, successes in Iraq, for that matter.
And even in Afghanistan, you have al-Qaeda holed up in the disputed territories of Pakistan where they're going to be very difficult to get at.
But again, it's going to take cooperation and international liaison and great patience.
You're not going to do it with 150,000 troops in a country like Iraq, which has totally destabilized the entire Middle East.
And now we can look around and see $4 a gallon oil, and maybe it'll soon be $6 a gallon oil.
You can thank George Bush and Dick Cheney for that.
All right, everybody.
That's a taste of what you get in this book.
It's called Failure of Intelligence, the Decline and Fall of the CIA by Melvin A. Goodman.
He was a senior analyst in Soviet affairs at the CIA for two decades.
He later served as a Soviet analyst at the State Department and is currently a professor of international studies at the National War College and a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy.
And his other books are Gorbachev's Retreat, The End of Superpower Rivalry in the Third World, and The Wars of Edward, I can't say his name, and The End of the Cold War.
All right.
Thanks very much for your time today, Mel.
Thank you, Scott.
Good to be with you, and thanks for taking the books so seriously.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
It was great, and I'll get you that sound bite as soon as I can.
Thank you.
Appreciate that.
