{"id":173699,"date":"2020-11-30T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2020-11-30T12:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=173699"},"modified":"2020-11-26T05:05:16","modified_gmt":"2020-11-26T05:05:16","slug":"a-long-forgotten-cia-document-from-wikileaks-sheds-critical-light-on-todays-u-s-politics-and-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/11\/a-long-forgotten-cia-document-from-wikileaks-sheds-critical-light-on-todays-u-s-politics-and-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"A Long-Forgotten CIA Document from WikiLeaks Sheds Critical Light on Today’s U.S. Politics and Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Agency knew that their best asset for selling their wars was Barack Obama — the same reason so many in the security state were eager to get rid of Donald Trump.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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(Photo Illustration by Omar Marques\/SOPA Images\/LightRocket via Getty Images)<\/p><\/div>\n

23 Nov 2020 – <\/em>The first time I ever wrote<\/strong> about WikiLeaks was back in early 2010<\/a>, when the group was still largely unknown. What prompted my attention was a small article in <\/a>The New York Times<\/a><\/em> which began this way:<\/p>\n

To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added\u00a0WikiLeaks.org<\/a>, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The NYT<\/em> explained that the Pentagon had prepared a secret 2008 plan in which they plotted how to destroy WikiLeaks, including by purposely leaking to it false documents with the hope that the group would publish the fakes and forever obliterate their credibility \u2014 a dastardly scheme which was ironically leaked to WikiLeaks, which promptly posted the document on its website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Any group that the U.S. security state includes on its \u201clist of enemies\u201d by virtue of publishing its secrets is one that is going to attract my interest, and likely my support. As a result \u2014 months before they made international headlines with publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs and diplomatic cables from Hillary Clinton\u2019s State Department \u2014 I immediately investigated everything I could about the group\u2019s founding and mission; interviewed its founder Julian Assange; and urged readers to help support the fledging group, concluding that \u201cone of the last avenues to uncover government and other elite secrets are whistle blowers and organizations that enable them.\u00a0WikiLeaks is one of the world’s most effective such groups, and it’s thus no surprise that they’re under such sustained attacks.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reason for my conclusion was that WikiLeaks had been exposing incriminating secrets of corrupt power centers for years. The technology they pioneered \u2014 enabling sources to leak to them troves of documents without anyone, including WikiLeaks itself, knowing the source\u2019s identity \u2014 was a major innovation in enabling greater transparency for the world\u2019s most powerful factions.<\/p>\n

But it was one WikiLeaks document<\/strong> that particularly caught my attention at first: a classified 2010 CIA \u201cRed Cell Memorandum,\u201d named after the highly secretive unit<\/a> created by Bush\/Cheney CIA Director George Tenet in the wake of the 9\/11 attack.<\/p>\n

What made this document so fascinating, so revealing, is the CIA\u2019s discussion of how to manipulate public opinion to ensure it remains at least tolerant if not supportive of Endless War and, specifically, the vital role President Obama played for the CIA in packaging and selling U.S. wars around the world. In this classified analysis, one learns a great deal about how the \u201cmilitary industrial complex,\u201d also known as the \u201cBlob\u201d or \u201cDeep State,\u201d reasons; how the Agency exploits humanitarian impulses to ensure continuation of its wars; and what the real function is of the U.S. President when it comes to foreign policy.<\/p>\n

What prompted the memo was the CIA\u2019s growing fears that the population of Western Europe was rapidly turning against the War on Terror generally and the war in Afghanistan specifically \u2014 as evidenced by the fall of the Dutch Government driven in large part by the electorate\u2019s anger over involvement in Afghanistan<\/a>. The CIA was desperate to figure out how to stem the tide of anti-war sentiment growing throughout that region, particularly to shield France and Germany from it, by manipulating public opinion.<\/p>\n

The Agency concluded: its best and only asset for doing that was President Obama and his popularity in Western European cities.<\/p>\n

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Classified CIA document published by WikiLeaks on March 26, 2010<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The premise of the CIA memo was that the populations of NATO countries participating in the War in Afghanistan did not support that war. What those allied governments and the CIA relied upon \u2014 as the above headline notes \u2014 was what the agency called \u201cpublic apathy\u201d: meaning that the war\u2019s \u201clow public salience has allowed French and German leaders to disregard popular opposition and steadily increase their troop contributions to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, as long as the public stayed sufficiently inattentive, their democratically leaders were free to ignore their wishes and stay fighting in a war that the citizens of that country opposed. But what concerned the CIA most was that simmering dislike for the war in Western Europe would turn into active, concentrated opposition \u2014 as had just happened in Holland \u2014 forcing the worst of all outcomes: that the governments fighting with the U.S. in Afghanistan for close to a decade would actually have to honor the beliefs of their citizens that the war was not worth it, and pull out, leaving the U.S. to shoulder the burden alone:<\/p>\n

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Whatever happens, the one thing the CIA cannot not tolerate is having the leaders of allied countries \u201clistening to the voters\u201d (that\u2019s why the CIA has long preferred its \u201cpartner\u201d countries be ruled by tyrannies: no need to accommodate bothersome public opinion). But even in western democracies, as long as the population remains sufficiently inattentive, the CIA reasoned, then their anti-war sentiments could be safely ignored.<\/p>\n

The problem in 2010 was that there was an increasing awareness in western Europe of how anathema the War in Afghanistan was to their values, how wasteful were the resources expended, and how little any of it had to do with the quality of their own lives. That public opinion problem \u2014 or, one might say, the nuisance of democracy \u2014 was where, as usual, the CIA came in.<\/p>\n

To solve the problem<\/strong> of growing anti-war sentiment in Western Europe, the agency devised two primary solutions: 1) exploit the plight of Afghan women to tug on the heartstrings of the Germans and French and try to persuade them \u2014 particularly European women \u2014 that the war in Afghanistan was really some sort of humanitarian project to help people, not a geo-strategic effort to control the region and its resources; and 2) use the popularity among Europeans of President Obama, now a Nobel Peace Prize winner, to put a pretty, sophisticated, cosmopolitan face on the war in place of the hardened Evangelical Texan swagger that George W. Bush represented.<\/p>\n

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But none of this would have worked, in the CIA\u2019s estimation, without having a President who could effectively use his popularity abroad to sell the war not as a barbaric act of endless aggression but as a humanitarian gesture that \u2014 like the President himself \u2014 was benevolent, noble, and kind. As a result of their positive views of Obama, the agency concluded, the French and Germans would not only \u201cbe receptive to [Obama\u2019s] direct affirmation of their importance to the [Afghanistan] mission\u201d \u2014 that would be the positive reinforcement \u2014 but would also be \u201csensitive to [his] direct expressions of disappointment in allies who do not help.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, Obama was like a kind but righteous father whose nobility you believed in even when it came to bombing villages and shooting up schoolyards, and whose moral disappointment (you\u2019re not living up to your duties as an ally<\/em>) you were eager to avoid. Polling data thus showed that when Europeans were reminded that Obama supported the war in Afghanistan, support increased significantly:<\/p>\n

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It is hard to overstate<\/strong> how revealing this document is. Just months before the CIA heralded Obama\u2019s unique ability to sell the war and ensure its continuation, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee awarded Obama its highest honor for what it called<\/a> \u201chis extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,\u201d adding: \u201cfor 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world\u2019s leading spokesman.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet the CIA, as it so often does, knew the hidden truth: that Obama\u2019s most important value was in prettifying, marketing and prolonging wars<\/a>, not ending them. They saw him for what U.S. Presidents really are: instruments to create a brand and image about the U.S. role in the world that can be effectively peddled to both the domestic population in the U.S. and then on the global stage, and specifically to pretend that endless barbaric U.S. wars are really humanitarian projects benevolently designed to help people \u2014 the pretext used to justify every war<\/a> by every country in history.<\/p>\n

Many have questioned why the CIA would be so vehemently opposed to Donald Trump\u2019s candidacy, and then his presidency. Though he did question many of their most prized pieties \u2014 from regime change wars such as in Syria to the ongoing viability of NATO after the fall of the Soviet Union \u2014 and did harshly criticize their intelligence failures (which is what prompted Chuck Schumer\u2019s pre-inauguration warning<\/a> that they would exact revenge on him for doing so), it\u2019s not as if Trump were some sort of peacenik President. He made good on his campaign promise to <\/a>escalate<\/a><\/em> bombing<\/a> campaigns in the name of fighting terrorism with fewer constraints than before<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But one major reason for the contempt harbored for Trump among security state operatives was his inability and unwillingness to prettify barbaric U.S. actions and to pretend that the U.S. is something other than it is. Recall the fury and rage provoked in 2017 when, in response to a question by Fox News<\/em>\u2019 Bill O\u2019Reilly about Putin\u2019s use of violence against journalists and others, Trump responded<\/a>: “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”<\/p>\n

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The rage from that comment was obviously not driven by any doubts about the truth of Trump\u2019s statement. No sentient person would recognize it as anything other than true. The anger was due to the fact that presidents are not supposed to tell the truth<\/em> about the U.S. and what it does in the world (just as Presidents are supposed to pretend they hate despots even as they support them in every conceivable way<\/a>). As the 2010 CIA memo reflects, useful presidents are those, like Obama, skilled at deceiving the world and propagandizing them to view U.S. aggression as benign, so as to allow even democratically elected leaders to act in contradiction to public opinion when doing so suits U.S. interests.<\/p>\n

As I wrote in 2017<\/a> when the foreign policy community and pundit class feigned anger over Trump\u2019s embrace of the Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, as if support for tyranny was a violation of U.S. values rather than a staple of post-World-War-II U.S. policy:<\/p>\n

What Trump is achieving by opening the White House doors to Sisi is not ushering in a new policy but rather clarifying and illuminating a very old one. This Trumpian effect \u2014 unmasking in all its naked ugliness what D.C. mavens prefer to keep hidden \u2014 is visible\u00a0in multiple other areas\u2026..<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the reason so many in Washington \u2014 who never met a pro-U.S. dictator they weren\u2019t willing to arm and fund \u2014 are so upset by all this. Sisi isn\u2019t someone you invite over to your house for dinner; he\u2019s someone you send money and weapons to in secret after you give your pretty speeches in front of American flags about human rights and freedom. What Trump is violating is not any Washington principles or ethics but Washington propaganda tactics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s not just Trump who infuriated powerful U.S. actors by revealing the true face of the U.S. to the world. It\u2019s also Julian Assange who did so, by founding an organization that published documents like this one that revealed such vital truths.<\/p>\n

For that exposure, the CIA relentlessly attacked Trump starting from before he was even elected, and for the same reason, Assange is sitting in a British prison on espionage charges from the U.S. Department of Justice. Few things infuriate U.S. foreign policy elites more than those who, unwittingly or otherwise, show the true face of the U.S. security state to the world.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Glenn Greenwald\u00a0is\u00a0one of three co-founding editors of <\/em>The Intercept. He is a journalist, constitutional lawyer, and author of four <\/em>New York Times best-selling books on politics and law. His most recent book, <\/em>\u201cNo Place to Hide,\u201d is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. Prior to co-founding <\/em>The Intercept, Glenn\u2019s column was featured in the\u00a0<\/em>Guardian\u00a0and<\/em> Salon. He was the debut winner, along with Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work on the abusive detention conditions of Chelsea Manning. For his 2013 NSA reporting, he received the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting; the Gannett Foundation Award for investigative journalism and the Gannett Foundation Watchdog Journalism Award; the Esso Premio for Excellence in Investigative Reporting in Brazil (he was the first non-Brazilian to win), and the Electronic Frontier Foundation\u2019s Pioneer Award. Along with Laura Poitras, <\/em>Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. The NSA reporting he led for the <\/em>Guardian\u00a0was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 greenwald.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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