Just Think - News Archive

Pope Ushers In A Somber Christmas
VATICAN CITY, Dec. 24, 2002

(AP) Pope John Paul II ushered in the Christmas holiday Tuesday against the backdrop of a possible war against Iraq – a war to which the Vatican is voicing increasing opposition.

In recent days, top Vatican officials have said a "preventive" war against Iraq had no legal justification and could spark an anti-Christian campaign in the Muslim world.

CBS News
Dec 23, 2002
Iraq's Invitation To The CIA

(CBS) Iraq Monday mounted a public relations counterattack — offering to allow the Central Intelligence Agency to inspect suspected weapons sites — as Iraqi jets downed an American reconnaissance drone.

The unmanned Predator drone was conducting a reconnaissance mission in the southern no-fly zone, a senior official with U.S. Central Command said, when Iraqi fighter aircraft penetrated the zone and fired on the Predator, and its controllers then lost contact with the plane.

Iraq frequently fires on U.S. and British aircraft patrolling the two no-fly zones, and coalition aircraft often retaliate by bombing air defense stations. The frequency of these skirmishes appears to have increased as the prospect of all-out war looms larger.

Gen. Richard Meyers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said in a Monday briefing that if the drone had been shot down, it would not mark an escalation. He said two other drones had been shot down earlier.

That prospect grew last week when the United States said Iraq's 12,000-page weapons dossier was incomplete and constituted a "material breach": of United Nations requirements — terminology that could be used to justify war.

Iraq's chief science adviser Monday argued that it has already handed over every shred of information it has about it's weapons program, but if that still isn't enough, the CIA could come into Iraq to see for itself, reports CBS News Correspondent Lee Cowan.

Saddam's scientific adviser Amir Al-Saadi accused the United States and Britain of ignoring Iraq's replies and making judgments before U.N. experts could fully examine the Iraqi declaration.

"Why don't they let the specialized organs of the United Nations get on with their task?" al-Saadi asked at a televised news conference.

"We don't even have an objection if the CIA itself comes and joins the inspection teams to show them the places which they claim have something," he said. That despite the fact that Iraq frequently accused an earlier UN monitoring team of being a front for American intelligence.

Later, Saddam Hussein continued the theme, using a photo opportunity to criticize U.S. aggression and argued that after more than three weeks of UN inspections, nothing incriminating has been found.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said it was not clear how the United States would respond.

"I have no idea what the decision will be with respect to that; I read the same statements," Rumsfeld said. "I'm not sure if they're accurate or if they were actually given by responsible people there and I don't know quite what the United States might consider doing."

Saddam, facing strengthened United Nations resolution calling for him to reveal and destroy any weapons that he agreed to give up after the 1991 Gulf War, denies he has any.

The Bush administration, which contends Iraq does possess such arms, says the lack of discoveries to date is for lack of looking, is urging the UN to increase the number of inspectors to 300 — triple what's on the ground now.

Meanwhile, a chemical team returned to a baby milk factory bombed during the Gulf War, while others fanned out to an engineering company and an animal vaccination plant.

Also Monday, officials with the U.N. nuclear agency said its inspectors had begun interviewing Iraqi nuclear scientists on a one-on-one basis.

"We are now in a phase where those interviews are taking place, but we are not revealing when or how many or with whom," said Mark Gwozdecki, chief spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is searching for banned nuclear weapons.

U.N. experts have made almost daily inspections since resuming work in Iraq last month, working there for the first time since teams left in 1998 ahead of U.S. and British air strikes launched to punish Baghdad for alleged failure to cooperate.

Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix has said the Iraqi weapons declaration earlier this month leaves so many unanswered questions that it is impossible to confirm the accuracy of Iraq's claim to have no weapons of mass destruction. Blix has asked the United States and Britain to share intelligence to help inspectors determine the truth.

In Washington Saturday, two U.S. government officials said the United States has been providing the United Nations with intelligence on Iraqi weapons sites. A senior U.S. official added that in the next two weeks, as the inspectors grow in number in Iraq, the United States will provide more detailed intelligence reports.

The Bush administration insisted last week that the fact Iraq is in "material breach" was not a trigger for war. However, the deadline for the inspectors to report, Jan. 27, falls at an ideal time for Pentagon war planners, and a decision on whether the use force is expected then.

A senior administration official said on condition of anonymity Sunday that the United States is in "watch and wait" mode this week.

Babil, the Iraqi newspaper run by Saddam's son Odai, said in a front-page editorial Monday that the United States was a "terrorist country" that wanted to attack Iraq as part of a plot to control the region.

CNN
Dec 22, 2002
Iraq welcomes 'American intelligence' to weapons hunt
Denies 'material omissions' in declaration

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraq's top government scientist Sunday said his country would welcome "someone from American intelligence" to show U.N. weapons inspectors where President Bush believes Iraq is hiding its weapons programs.

Gen. Amir Al-Saadi said U.S. and British claims that Iraq is hiding nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs are "old rehashed reports," some from as far back as 1990, that Iraq has already disproved.

"After 24 days of inspections covering practically all the sites named in those reports and after the submission of our declaration of December 7, the lies and baseless allegations have been uncovered," he said. "The true part of the half-truths appear in detail in our declaration."

America can see for itself and send an agent to the country if it would like, Al-Saadi said.

"We even wouldn't mind if someone from the American intelligence were to accompany the inspection teams to show them the places in which they allege there is something," he said.

Al-Saadi denied British and U.S. allegations that Iraq's declaration of its weapons programs contains serious "material omissions."

The United States and Britain "are the only players in this macabre game against Iraq," the general said.

Al-Saadi cited a statement from the U.S. Department of State accusing the Iraqis of ignoring "efforts to procure uranium from Niger" in its declaration.

"It was not uranium," he said. "It was uranium oxide -- not a weapon -- in the mid-1980s. It is in the declaration. And there has been no new procurement or attempt to procure."

Uranium oxide is a source of uranium, however, and weapons-grade uranium can be produced from it through uranium enrichment.

Al-Saadi also accused former UNSCOM chief weapons inspector Richard Butler of trying to plant evidence that Iraq was producing VX gas, a lethal chemical weapons agent.

"There was an attempt to produce in April 1990 a quantity of VX, but it was not successful," he said. "The material degraded rapidly and the production was abandoned because it was considered a waste. And that was that. There was no VX gas."

The United States has accused Iraq of failing to account for material that can be used to grow such biological agents as anthrax, botulinum toxin, which causes botulism, and clostridium perfringens, a common and potentially deadly cause of food poisoning. It also said Iraq was manufacturing fuel for missiles and hiding mobile biological weapons facilities. Iraq has denied possessing any missiles.

Al-Saadi denied the claims and asked the United States and others to "let the inspectors do their work."

'Substantial likelihood' of winter war
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov Sunday stressed Russia's opposition to any unilateral action by the United States against Iraq.

"Our common goal is to ensure that Iraq should not have weapons of mass destruction," Ivanov said, according to the Russian news agency Interfax. "It must be attained on the basis of the U.N. Security Council's resolution No. 1441. All other goals go beyond the limits of our interests."

Meanwhile, Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana told CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer," that so far the course of events had gone on "unfortunately predictably," but he also speculated that Saddam may be inclined to flee a massive build-up of U.S. military force against him.

Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska, called Iraq's declaration "a lot of nonsense," but said on CBS' Face the Nation that he didn't "believe war is irreversible."

"If the president decides that the only option is to take this country to war against Iraq, then he's going to have to do more than he has done up to this point," he said. "But I believe he understands that."

The incoming ranking Democrat on the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, said on "Fox News Sunday" that war wasn't "necessarily" inevitable, but said Saddam seemed certain "to miscalculate again," bringing "a clear support from the U.N. to use force."

But Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was pessimistic, predicting "a substantial likelihood that we will go to war with Iraq this winter," and adding that an attack on Iraq would likely spark a flurry of terrorist attacks against the United States at home and abroad.

The Pentagon Muzzles the CIA
Devising bad intelligence to promote bad policy
By Robert Dreyfuss
12.16.02

Even as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq, according to former CIA officials. Key officials of the Department of Defense are also producing their own unverified intelligence reports to justify war. Much of the questionable information comes from Iraqi exiles long regarded with suspicion by CIA professionals. A parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation, in the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, collects the information from the exiles and scours other raw intelligence for useful tidbits to make the case for preemptive war. These morsels sometimes go directly to the president.
The war over intelligence is a critical part of a broader offensive by the party of war within the Bush administration against virtually the entire expert Middle East establishment in the United States -- including State Department, Pentagon and CIA area specialists and leading military officers. Inside the foreign-policy, defense and intelligence agencies, nearly the whole rank and file, along with many senior officials, are opposed to invading Iraq. But because the less than two dozen neoconservatives leading the war party have the support of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, they are able to marginalize that opposition.

Morale inside the U.S. national-security apparatus is said to be low, with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured to justify the push for war. At the State Department, where Secretary of State Colin Powell's efforts at diplomacy have thus far slowed the relentless pressure for war, a key bureau is chilled by the presence of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Elizabeth L. Cheney, the vice president's daughter, who is in charge of Middle East economic policy, including oil. "When [Near East Affairs] meets, there is no debate," says Parker Borg, who served in the State Department for 30 years as an ambassador and deputy chief of counterterrorism. "How vocal would you be about commenting on Middle East policy with the vice president's daughter there?" Undersecretary of State John Bolton is also part of the small pro-war faction.

And at the Pentagon, where a number of critical offices have been filled by hawkish neoconservatives whose commitment to war with Iraq goes back a decade, Middle East specialists and uniformed military officers alike are seeing their views ignored. "I've heard from people on the Middle East staff in the Pentagon," says Borg, referring to the staff under neocon Peter Rodman, the assistant secretary of defense for International Security Affairs. "The Middle East experts in those officers are as cut off from the policy side as people in the State Department are."

But the sharpest battle is over the CIA. "There is tremendous pressure on [the CIA] to come up with information to support policies that have already been adopted," says Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior CIA official and counterterrorism expert. What's unfolding is a campaign by well-placed hawks to undermine the CIA's ability to provide objective, unbiased intelligence to the White House.

Voice crackling over his cell phone, Jim Woolsey is trying hard to sound objective and analytical, but he is, well, gloating. The former CIA director has been one of the leaders of the get-Saddam Hussein faction for years, promoting a unilateral U.S. strike against Baghdad. Woolsey is not quite a private citizen, serving as an adviser to the CIA and as a member of the Defense Policy Board, which is chaired by the ringleader of the pro-war neocons, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle. Woolsey has also, at least once, served as unofficial liaison to the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and other Iraqi opposition groups.

What's got him excited is an Oct. 7 letter, recently declassified, from CIA Director George Tenet that put the CIA on record for the first time as saying that there have been "high-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade"; that Iraq and Osama bin Laden's gang have "discussed safe haven"; that members of al-Qaeda have been present in Baghdad; and that Iraq has "provided training to al-Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases."

"The CIA has started saying things that the Defense Department has been saying all along, but up until that letter, I hadn't seen any evidence publicly that the CIA was acknowledging all these contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda," says Woolsey. "What I read the Tenet letter as saying is that they are starting to. The CIA has started to come around to point out some of the things that the Pentagon has been talking about."

Tenet's statement on Iraq and al-Qaeda was a significant departure from the consensus view among intelligence professionals. Since September 11, many of them, inside government and out, have pooh-poohed the notion that Iraq has provided support to al-Qaeda, and they continue to do so. Daniel Benjamin, co-author, with Steven Simon, of The Age of Sacred Terror, was director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council (NSC) in the late 1990s, and he oversaw a comprehensive review of Iraq and terrorism that came up empty. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link [between] al-Qaeda and Iraq," says Benjamin. "We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact. No other issue has been as closely scrutinized as this one." The State Department's annual review of state-sponsored terrorism hasn't mentioned any link, either.

A sign of how the Iraq-al-Qaeda issue is roiling the agency is how Tenet himself qualified the analysis. In his letter, addressed to Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Tenet wrote: "Our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda is evolving and is based on sources of varying reliability." Benjamin, along with other analysts, points out that the CIA's letter seemed to strain to make the connection, noting that the phrase "sources of varying reliability" is "a way of saying that there isn't much evidence."

But if after failing to find links between Iraq and al-Qaeda for years the CIA is suddenly discovering a connection between the two, some analysts believe that it is Tenet, the CIA director, playing politics and arranging to tell the Pentagon what it wants to hear. "[The CIA] is giving Bush what he wanted on Iraq and al-Qaeda," says Melvin Goodman of the Center for International Policy, who is also a former CIA Soviet expert and a fierce critic of politicized intelligence. "Tenet is playing the game, to a certain extent." Goodman, who has maintained contacts inside the agency, says that the CIA's key intelligence analysts are upset with Tenet and concerned that he will frame their conclusions in a way that kowtows to the Pentagon's preconceived view. "There's a lot of anger and questions about whether Tenet will hold off this pressure," Goodman says. "[The CIA analysts are] worried, and they don't have a lot of confidence in him. But the analytical core is holding fast to the evidence, and the evidence doesn't show that link."

However, the intense pressure from the Pentagon seems to be having an effect. Tenet is, after all, a politician, not a CIA veteran. After serving as staff director for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Tenet moved over to the CIA itself and was named to the director's job by President Clinton. But he took pains to ingratiate himself with the Bushes, père et fils. He quickly acted to name the CIA headquarters after former President Bush in 1998, organized a major intelligence conference at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University -- itself headed by Robert Gates, a former CIA director -- and personally briefed then-Texas Gov. Bush during the 2000 election campaign. Tenet's quiet politicking was enough to persuade Bush to keep him on at the CIA, and the director's recent actions signal that he doesn't intend to buck the drive toward war.

"It's demoralizing to a number of the analysts," says Cannistraro. "The analysts are human, and some of them are also ambitious. What you have to worry about is the 'chill factor.' If people are ignoring your intelligence, and the Pentagon and NSC keep telling you, 'What about this? What about this? Keep looking!' -- well, then you start focusing on one thing instead of the other thing, because you know that's what your political masters want to hear."

Spy vs. Spy
For more than a year, one of the main sources of Defense Department pressure on the CIA has been a unnamed, rump intelligence unit set up in Undersecretary Feith's policy shop at the department. Begun as a two-person group, it has since expanded to four and now five people, and was set up to provide Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Feith with data they can use to disparage, undermine and contradict the CIA's own analyses. Established just after September 11, the unit's main focus -- though not its only one -- has been on Iraq, especially Iraq's alleged links to al-Qaeda and Iraq's alleged intent to use its alleged nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

In a controversial Oct. 24 briefing at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld noted that a primary purpose of the unit was to provide him with ammunition that he could use to harass the CIA staffer who briefs him every morning. "In comes the briefer, and she walks through the daily brief and I ask questions," said Rumsfeld. "What I could do is say, 'Gee, what about this? Or what about that? Has somebody thought of this?'" Using powerful computers and having access to reams of intelligence factoids, Feith's team could create a steady stream of data bits that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith himself could use to pick apart the CIA's conclusions, sending the CIA's collectors and analysts back to rewrite their reports.

The fact that the unit is overseen by Feith, an ideologically committed partisan who is pushing for war with Iraq, raises questions about its impartiality and its willingness to reach conclusions that might contradict the Pentagon leadership's stated policy intentions. "It's one thing to create a unit to provide an independent look, and it's another thing to go on a fishing expedition," says Benjamin, the former NSC official. "The fact that this unit has been there for more than a year suggests that it is a fishing expedition."

Informed sources say the person in charge of the unnamed unit is Abram Shulsky, another key member of the Perle-Wolfowitz war party. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) was elected to the Senate in 1976, he "brought with him some of [Sen. Henry M.] Jackson's most militantly neoconservative former aides, among them Elliott Abrams, Chester Finn, Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt," according to a 1986 account in The Washington Post. Perle was also a former Jackson aide, and Shulsky, Perle and many kindred thinkers got jobs in President Reagan's Department of Defense in the 1980s. Shulsky also spent years at the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, a project of the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC), and at the RAND Corporation. At RAND, along with other fellow neocons, including I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby (now Cheney's chief of staff), Shulsky contributed a study called "From Containment to Global Leadership: America and the World after the Cold War." That study was a forerunner of the recent military strategy document released by the Pentagon suggesting that the United States act to preserve its global hegemony, even if it means preemptive war or preventive war making.

Roy Godson, the head of the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence and a colleague of Shulsky's for many years, has high hopes for the success of the Pentagon's Iraq intelligence unit, despite its small size when arrayed against the CIA's might. "It might turn out to be a David against Goliath," says Godson.

Dubious Intelligence
The Pentagon's war against the CIA relies heavily on intelligence from the Iraqi National Congress. But most Iraq hands with long experience in dealing with that country's tumultuous politics consider the INC's intelligence-gathering abilities to be nearly nil. Yet, Perle, Woolsey and the Pentagon's policy-makers increasingly use the INC as their primary source of information about Iraq's weapons programs, its relationship to terrorism and its internal political dynamics. "A lot of what is useful with respect to what's going on in Iraq is coming from defectors, and furthermore they are defectors who have often come through an organization, namely, the INC, that neither State nor the CIA likes very much," Woolsey told me.

Earlier this year, the State Department abruptly stopped funding an INC scheme to collect intelligence inside Iraq. "The INC could only account for $2.5 million out of $4.5 million they received for the program," says a State Department official. "I can't say that there was evidence of corruption or embezzlement, but $2 million was unaccounted for." The more the INC began getting into intelligence work, the more the State Department grew uncomfortable funding the program. "The only reason they stopped paying for that program is that the State Department hates the INC," says a knowledgeable source. Shortly thereafter, the Pentagon picked up the tab. Now, whatever intelligence the INC collects goes straight to the Defense Department, according to spokesman Lt. Col. David Lapan. "The intelligence guys here get the information first and do the analysis," he says. Goodman, the former CIA analyst, concurs, saying, "The INC is in the Pentagon every day."

But the Pentagon's critics are appalled that intelligence provided by the INC might shape U.S. decisions about going to war against Baghdad. At the CIA and at the State Department, Ahmed Chalabi, the INC's leader, is viewed as the ineffectual head of a self-inflated and corrupt organization skilled at lobbying and public relations, but not much else. [See "Tinker, Banker, Neocon, Spy," tap, Nov. 18.] "The [INC's] intelligence isn't reliable at all," says Cannistraro. "Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear. And much of it is used to support Chalabi's own presidential ambitions. They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches."

Adds Cannistraro, "They're willing to twist information in order to serve that interest. They've opened up a channel at the Pentagon to collect intelligence from Iraqi exiles, using people off the books, contractors. It's getting pretty close to an Iran-Contra type of situation."

Manipulating the CIA is nothing new, of course. For decades, politicians annoyed that intelligence from the agency might work against policy goals have sought to bring pressure to bear on the CIA to alter its views or, failing that, to diminish the CIA's standing. During the Vietnam War, the Pentagon disparaged CIA analyses that cast into doubt the projected "light at the end of the tunnel." In the 1970s, then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush invited a so-called Team B group of neoconservative hawks to spin out a report accusing the CIA ("Team A") of consistently underestimating the Soviet threat. (Team B, it's worth noting, was created at the instigation of Albert Wohlstetter, the political godfather to Perle, Wolfowitz, et al.) That pressure continued, in other forms, during Ronald Reagan's military buildup in the 1980s. In the 1980s, too, then-CIA Director Bill Casey was notorious for constantly trying to politicize the CIA, repeatedly trying to influence the agency's reporting on Central America, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union.

The Uses of Endless War
The hostility by the hard-liners against what they see as the CIA's myopia on Iraq at least matches any of those earlier fights. Perle, who said recently that the CIA's analysis of Iraq "isn't worth the paper it's written on," adds that the CIA is afraid of rocking the ark in the Middle East. "The CIA is status-quo oriented," he told me. "They don't want to take risks. They don't like the INC because they only like to work with people they can control."

According to informed sources, Perle, who's currently based at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has for the past several years sponsored the work of a former CIA clandestine operative, Reuel Marc Gerecht, helping him financially, lending him the use of his villa in France to write a book and getting him a fellowship at AEI. Gerecht, who spends much of his time living in Brussels, maintains close ties to the INC via its centers in London and Washington. According to a person familiar with the arrangement, Gerecht is privately working with the INC's intelligence people to help funnel information to Feith's office in the Pentagon.

Asked whether he is working as an unofficial intelligence handler for the INC, Gerecht demurs but doesn't deny it. "It's pretty overstated," he says. "I talk to the Iraqi opposition now and then, but there are a lot more people in Washington who talk to the Iraqi opposition. So I don't think that Pentagon requires my assistance ... in gathering information from Iraqi opposition." But Gerecht is quick to criticize the CIA over Iraq. "There is a great deal of hesitancy if not opposition to the war at the agency," he says. "I don't think [Rumsfeld] is terribly happy. The collective output that CIA puts out is usually pretty mushy. I think it's fair to say that the civilian leadership isn't terribly cracked up about the intelligence they receive from CIA."

To call Gerecht a hard-liner on Iraq would be an understatement. For him and for many of his allies -- Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and others -- an attack on Iraq is a strategic necessity, not because Saddam Hussein is a threat but because America needs to display an overwhelming show of force to keep unruly Arabs and Muslims all over the world in line. "If we really intend to extinguish the hope that has fueled the rise of al-Qaeda and violent anti-Americanism throughout the Middle East, we have no choice but to re-instill in our foes and friends the fear and respect that attaches to any great power," he wrote in The Wall Street Journal last December. "Only a war against Saddam Hussein will decisively restore the awe that protects American interests abroad and citizens at home. We've been running from this fight for 10 years."

The Pentagon's campaign against the CIA is broader than just Iraq. Since the end of the Cold War, the CIA has been squeezed by the military again and again. Through its control over the National Security Agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other entities, the Pentagon already controls the vast bulk of America's spy budget. To consolidate that control, Rumsfeld is currently pushing to create an intelligence czar at the Pentagon whose power and influence would rival that of the CIA director's. And more and more often, the CIA's covert-operations arm finds itself dominated by the Defense Department's Special Forces units, the gung-ho soldiers who've been on the front lines in the ongoing, and apparently endless, war on terrorism.

What's at stake here is far greater than a bureaucratic turf battle. The CIA exists to provide pure and unbiased intelligence to its chief customer, the president. George W. Bush, whose knowledge of world affairs is limited at best, probably depends more heavily than most presidents on what his aides tell him about the outside world. And there is mounting evidence that the decision to go to war is based on intelligence of doubtful veracity, which has been cooked by Pentagon hawks.