re: "Historical Revisionism [Part 3]"

Bill at Castle Argghhh! finishes off the Big Lie about Iraq's WMD.

Money quote(s):

"Right after we captured Baghdad, there were a *lot* of PAO-type pix appearing in SIPRNET mail to various units (all combat arms outfits, as far as I could tell), showing US and Iraqi equipment, battlefield shots of blown-up tanks and people, etc., and some stuff highlighting the technology we used. Our S-2 knew I'd think that was real neat, so he called me in to show me. Among the goodies were two AWACS radar screenshots labeled "Iraqi truck convoys converging on Syria" -- lines of little glowing dots on the highways heading north, then turning northwest. They gave a timeline, but all I remember was it happened the night before we jumped.

Next day, there was a recall of the mail with the pix, citing OPSEC violations on the AWACS pix because they showed US positions -- bear in mind that the pix were a full week old, and that US units had already reached Baghdad by the time they were released. Our S-2, being a good S-2, promptly deleted the stuff without a thought. So did everybody else, as far as I can determine, including the military intel types OCONUS with SIPRNET access. Later, I heard the oblique AWACS screenshots were compared with satellite overhead photos and were matched to a gnat's eyelash.

Some time later, the Dems in Congress began screaming that Bush was a war criminal because we hadn't found Saddam's WMD -- we had found a lot of WMD and WMD-related stuff, but the Dems kept screaming "That's not the WMD Bush said they had."

Which morphed into the pre-election Talking/Screaming Point “We went to war in Iraq for a lie, because there were no WMD!” that continues to this day.

Now, let’s recap.

Did we find chemical weapons that Saddam had hidden from the UN inspectors? Yup.

Did we find biological warfare labs and delivery systems? Yup.

Two out of three, so far, and either one standing alone exposes “There were no WMD” as a lie."

It helps if you have no real understanding of the meaning of WMD in the first place. Then it's easier to be that stupid. (Ignorance is like that.)

That being said, I never saw any of that sort of "take." But then I didn't see much else in that line of intelligence collection: as intelligence collectors, we were just too far down in the weeds ourselves.

"Did we find a nuclear weapons program? Well, yes and no.

Yes, we found the evidence, but was it an ongoing program? Saddam himself lied about stopping and starting so often, that, if it wasn’t ongoing during the weeks before the invasion – and Saddam *knew* it was on the way -- chances are very good that he would have cranked it up again had we *not* jumped in.

Was the program stolen from under our noses while we were in the process of restoring some semblance of normalcy to Iraq?

Or was it just on hiatus until Saddam – or his designated heir – could open up for business in a new location? *Something* was on the convoys going into Syria, which the Iraqis, sources in at least two of Iraq’s neighbors, and the CIA's ace advisor have confirmed."

Bill then goes on to explain some basic facts about the party politics of Saddam's Iraq and Assad's Syria (which remains true today).

He concludes:

"Dick Cheney had the pix, he had the background info, he had the ear of the President, and he had enough personal authority to release them to shut the Dems up.

Those of us who knew about the pix kept expecting a dog-and-pony show from the White House which would stop this particular Big Lie in its tracks and reveal the Dems for what they were.

Any day, now... any day.

When he was asked (in 2010) why he didn't at least advise GWB to go public with the pix and their probable significance, Cheney just blew the question off, and said "we had other concerns at the time."

Swell. Thanks so much for being midwife to this particular Big Lie, Dick -- you gave us Barack Obama in 2008 and the resulting cascade of Big Lies we've been bombarded with ever since."

This is the most original reason for disliking Dick Cheney I've ever read. It bears thinking upon.

re: "Glass Houses"

Walter Jon Williams focuses his creative lense on the whole mess.

Money quote(s):

"The cables reflect pretty well on the State Department. These diplomats are doing what they’re trained for. They’re collecting local information, they’re reporting the candid views of foreign sources, and they’re providing information about personalities, sometimes hilariously— you’ve gotta love the detail about the Chechen dictator dancing at a wedding with his gold-plated pistol hanging out of his waistband.

It has to be said, though, that the big news is that this information was so easily obtained. The Pentagon’s Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet) is a worldwide US military network to which the State Department and its embassies have access. It runs on Windows XP, not exactly your best model of Internet security. Anyone with a Secret clearance has access not only to the diplomatic cables, but to everything else."

"SIPRNet is a classic example of a good idea gone haywire. The idea was to put every document related to terrorism on a single source, so that it could be accessed by anyone who needed it. But they dumped in loads of unrelated stuff as well, and now their own system has well and truly bitten them on the butt."

Actually, SIPRNet predates the GWOT by quite a few years, although Mr. Williams is correct (I think) if what he's getting at is State's inclusion of classified cable traffic. That came well after SIPRNet's establishment.

"It occurs to me that Russia may only exist because a few important people have decided that it does. And if those props are knocked out, does Russia just become another Iceland?"

It occurs to me that Russia already is another Iceland.

Except, of course, for all the things that make it so much more (and so much less) than Iceland.

No offense meant, Iceland.

"So for my money, the question now, is whether government and finance is only possible if the vast majority of the citizenry is kept in complete ignorance of what they are doing? If Secretary Rice, for fear of exposure, prevents her own analysts from analyzing anything, does that mean that government can no longer conduct the kind of debate and internal dialog that is necessary for a clear-sighted view of its future and its own operation? If the government can’t talk to itself for fear that someone’s listening, do we actually have a government, or just 2.15 million civil servants operating in a complete vacuum, unaware that a bigger picture even exists?"

Mr. Williams is getting to the heart of what I worry will be an over-reaction to the Wikileaks leaks; hamstringing our intelligence analysts and decision-makers through too-zealous or cookie-cutter application of need-to-know policies. After all, how does an intelligence analyst tell you he needs to know something if he doesn't already know about it? Kind of hard to do that if he's kept from knowing about it, isn't it?

This sort of thing spells "intelligence failure." Intelligence analysts know that there are, after all, only two kinds of military outcomes: operational successes and intelligence failures.

(Just to be clear, Mr. Williams knows that Sec. Rice no longer runs the State Dept.; he's mentioning her in the context of a story I didn't snippet from his post.)

re: "Digital security problem is bigger than Assange and PFC Manning"

Robert Haddick at Small Wars Journal ("facilitates the exchange of information among practitioners, thought leaders, and students of Small Wars, in order to advance knowledge and capabilities in the field") gives an excellent analysis.

Money quote(s):

"Prior to September 2001, administrators within the U.S. government had their reasons for stubbornly hoarding their agency’s secrets. In the wake of the latest Wikileaks episode involving classified State Department cables, some of those reasons are again apparent. The 9/11 Commission concluded that insufficient cross-agency sharing was partly to blame for the disaster. But we are now reminded that sharing brings its own risks. With a million people thought to have access to U.S. Secret-level correspondence and over 800,000 cleared for Top Secret access, the only surprise is that there are not more leaks. The problem of digital security extends beyond Mr. Assange and PFC Manning. Digital transmissions through the existing internet "cloud” will continue, but will increasingly consist of only the most inconsequential data and reports. The transmission of anything really sensitive will revert (if it hasn’t already) to pre-Internet methods – a hand-delivered document, a telephone call, or a face-to-face conversation in a secure room.

The fact that there have been so few surprises in the latest Wikileaks data dump is the best evidence that State Department cable-drafters, consciously or not, knew that these cables would have a very large audience. And the wider the audience becomes, the greater the incentive to be careful with secrets in the drafting. With so few differences between the content of these cables (admittedly classified no higher than Secret) and the content in the news media, we should conclude that U.S. diplomacy is already remarkably open and transparent."

&

"We should expect “Balkanization” of digital communications, with those needing high security dropping out of the existing system and setting up their own. The Defense Department’s SIPRNet has been an inadequate attempt at this answer, as the Wikileaks affair has revealed. DARPA (ironically the original inventor of the internet) now recommends that the Defense Department establish its own network hardware and software, a system that would emphasize security and would presumably be incompatible with the existing internet.

Users who need high security but who can’t afford their own custom network would be wise to revert to the pre-Internet age of the courier, the telephone, and for the most sensitive of thoughts, the face-to-face meeting. This should not be much of an adjustment for those possessing either suspicious minds or experience."

re: "Wikileaks"

The Armorer at Castle Argghhh! gives a pretty professional assessment.

Money quote(s):

"I for one, am not stunned by what PFC Manning managed to get access to, as anyone with a modicum of ability with access to the SIPRnet can attest. The goodness from this will probably be quicker tightening of security within the classified networks, by the expanded institution of some simple-to-implement checks on the "need-to-know" side of things.

Access to classified information has two parts - clearance at the appropriate level, *and* need-to-know. All "clearance" does is vet that your life-to-date has been examined and there are no huge warning signs that you aren't trustworthy to be considered for access to defined levels of information."

"Manning clearly had access to things he had no "need-to-know" reason to be accessing. For those who have been operating in that environment there has been steady and stuttering-but-inexorable movement to stitching up those seams, all tempered by a real desire to make information available to people who need it without going through a huge number of hoops to get it in a timely fashion in a time of war."

&

"It has been an interesting look into the State Department's world, and how things going on behind the scenes oft-times have little bearing to what's happening on the public side of things, as all governments have reason to present a public face that differs from the private. Sausage-making isn't pretty, but there didn't strike me that there was/were horrible revelations in there. More of it was along the lines of, "Yep, okay, that doesn't surprise me." and "People still don't get that some things should be said face-to-face and not in potentially record communications." But I don't believe that exposing what amounts to working papers is a good idea."

re: "Welcome to the 21st Century!"

Steve at Dead Men Working shares his evaluation.

Money quote(s):

"(O)f course, the fact that this person was able to gather so many documents indicates a lack of attention to the real first line of defense in the modern world: barriers to limit access to information to those who have a real need to know it, and tripwires to call attention to the kind of broad gathering of information that the perpetrator, Pfc. Bradley Manning, engaged in. SIPRNet, of course, has such barriers and such tripwires. But they were relaxed in Iraq, and apparently poorly monitored, and clearly, they failed."