Out of Town

Posted on October 2, 2007 by Michael Chevalier

I will be at the Miller Center for Public Policy tomorrow for another Forum.  It might be on some sort of television or be streamed on their site.  pl

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12 Responses to Out of Town

  1. W. Patrick Lang says:
    October 2, 2007 at 12:11 pm

    All
    I inadvertently deleted someone’s comment. send it again. pl

  2. anna missed says:
    October 3, 2007 at 5:05 am

    Wonder if you might post on the USS Liberty incident, where you have recently been mentioned as being informed about the original/disappeared transcripts. Some push back brewing in advance of the AIPAC Rosen/Weissman trials, or U.S. Israeli collusion against Iran? Just curious about the timing (and all).

  3. a knight says:
    October 3, 2007 at 7:31 am

    If you happen to run into Ken Hughes, could you inquire if his former exhibit: “The Nixon Presidency — 30 Years After – Seeking a ‘Decent Interval’ Exit From Vietnam” has been mirrored or published elsewhere? I have a use for citations of some Nixon Presidency taped conversations transcripts that were
    published in it. Truthfully, I scraped them when the exhibit was online, and have the transcripts, as well as the authoritative citations, but live URLs would have great potential utility.

  5. Will says:
    October 3, 2007 at 7:57 pm

    while goggling “patlang & USS Liberty” found some good stuff on other matters, nontheless amusing:
    ” Jeff Stein of Congressional Quarterly has a great recap of what former Pentagon spy-master Pat Lang and former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson had to say at a University of District of Columbia forum on May 7th.
    Here’s some Feith fun from Pat Lang:
    Patrick Lang told a hilarious story the other night, for example, about a job interview he had with Douglas Feith, a key architect of the invasion of Iraq.
    It was at the beginning of the first Bush term. Lang had been in charge of the Middle East, South Asia and terrorism for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the 1990s. Later he ran the Pentagon’s worldwide spying operations.
    In early 2001, his name was put forward as somebody who would be good at running the Pentagon’s office of special operations and low-intensity warfare, i.e., counterinsurgency. Lang had also been a Green Beret, with three tours in South Vietnam.
    One of the people he had to impress was Feith, the Defense Department’s number three official and a leading player in the clique of neoconservatives who had taken over the government’s national security apparatus.
    Lang went to see him, he recalled during a May 7 panel discussion at the University of the District of Columbia.
    “He was sitting there munching a sandwich while he was talking to me,” Lang recalled, “which I thought was remarkable in itself, but he also had these briefing papers — they always had briefing papers, you know — about me.
    “He’s looking at this stuff, and he says, ‘I’ve heard of you. I heard of you.’
    “He says, ‘Is it really true that you really know the Arabs this well, and that you speak Arabic this well? Is that really true? Is that really true?’
    “And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s really true.’
    “That’s too bad,” Feith said.
    The audience howled.
    “That was the end of the interview,” Lang said. “I’m not quite sure what he meant, but you can work it out.”
    Feith, of course, like the administration’s other Israel-connected hawks, didn’t want “Arabists” like Lang muddying the road to Baghdad, from where — according to the Bush administration theory — overthrowing Saddam Hussein would ignite mass demands for Western-style, pro-U.S. democracies across the entire Middle East.
    And some Lang on Wolfowitz:
    “I remember talking to [Paul] Wolfowitz, in his office, in the Pentagon, and telling him — this was after the propaganda build up had started, before the war. I said, ‘You know, these guys are not going to welcome you.’
    “He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘For one thing, these guys detest foreigners, and the few who really like you are the least representative of the various breeds of people there. They’re going to fight you, then, if you occupy the place there’s going to be a massive insurgency.'”
    “He said, ‘No, no, they’ll be glad to see us,'” Lang continued. “This will start the process of revolution around the Middle East that will transform everything.’
    No, Lang told Wolfowitz, “that’s not gonna happen. It’s just an impossibility. They’re not like that. They don’t want to be us.”
    Not everyone agrees with all of Lang’s views about the Arab world, but on this issue he was prescient, of course, as were almost all experts on the region outside of the neocon faithful.
    How come we learned so much of this dispute only after the war? ”
    thewashingtonnote

  6. Hannah K. O'Luthon says:
    October 4, 2007 at 1:24 am

    I too would like to hear Col. Lang’s comments on the attack on the Liberty. I take it as certain that it was a deliberate Israeli attack on what was known to be an American SIGINT vessel. What interests me is the enduring cover-up by U.S. officials. What sort of blackmail was used to keep this war crime under wraps? Who did the blackmailing and how was it imposed? As far as I can discern, the military officials involved all toed the line of silence imposed by their civilian bosses, albeit with great reluctance. In particular, following the order to cancel the air support being sent to the Liberty was an admirable example of respecting civilian primacy in the chain of command, but U.S. citizens might well suspect that the source of that order committed an act of treason. Of course, given the enduring secrecy about these “intimate details”, any such judgment is necessarily tentative and provisional.

  7. W. Patrick Lang says:
    October 4, 2007 at 7:50 am

    All
    See my comment on the USS Libery attack on The Athenaeum. pl

  8. dasher says:
    October 4, 2007 at 10:10 am

    From the Baltimore Sun article: “Someday the truth of this will come out,”
    No, it won’t. Almost all survivors and other participants and observers will be dead in a few years, and we will never know WHY the Israelis wanted to SINK this ship and KILL all its crew members.
    That is what shocks and intrigues me: why there was to have been no evidence that the ship was ever there, and why was there apparent complicity by some in the U.S.?

  10. Will says:
    October 5, 2007 at 10:01 am

    Sounds like an EMP. Electromagnetic Pulse bomb. There are non-nuclear limited versions. One of the options left out below is that the planes coud have come from Irak.
    from Debka
    “When the early warning stations in Syria were silenced, some communications systems, computers and cell phones were also knocked out in neighboring Lebanon – evidence that Syria had been bested in a cyber war against its electronic and radar systems.
    DEBKAfile adds: Syrian war planners are at sea on several key points, such as:
    1. When and from which did direction did the warplanes enter Syria airspace – the Mediterranean, Israel or Turkey? ”

  11. Clifford Kiracofe says:
    October 5, 2007 at 6:15 pm

    Stuff on USS Liberty:
    1. Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn’t tell full story of deadly ’67 incident
    By John Crewdson | Tribune senior correspondent
    October 2, 2007
    ….
    To a man, the survivors interviewed by the Tribune rejected Israel’s explanation.
    Nor, the survivors said, did they understand why the American 6th Fleet, which included the aircraft carriers America and Saratoga, patrolling 400 miles west of the Liberty, launched and then recalled at least two squadrons of Navy fighter-bombers that might have arrived in time to prevent the torpedo attack — and save 26 American lives.
    J.Q. “Tony” Hart, then a chief petty officer assigned to a U.S. Navy relay station in Morocco that handled communications between Washington and the 6th Fleet, remembered listening as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, in Washington, ordered Rear Adm. Lawrence Geis, commander of the America’s carrier battle group, to bring the jets home.
    When Geis protested that the Liberty was under attack and needed help, Hart said, McNamara retorted that “President [Lyndon] Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors.”
    ….
    Analyst: Israelis wanted it sunk
    The transcript published by the Jerusalem Post bore scant resemblance to the one that in 1967 rolled off the teletype machine behind the sealed vault door at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, where Steve Forslund worked as an intelligence analyst for the 544th Air Reconnaissance Technical Wing, then the highest-level strategic planning office in the Air Force.
    “The ground control station stated that the target was American and for the aircraft to confirm it,” Forslund recalled. “The aircraft did confirm the identity of the target as American, by the American flag.
    “The ground control station ordered the aircraft to attack and sink the target and ensure they left no survivors.”
    Forslund said he clearly recalled “the obvious frustration of the controller over the inability of the pilots to sink the target quickly and completely.”
    “He kept insisting the mission had to sink the target, and was frustrated with the pilots’ responses that it didn’t sink.”
    Nor, Forslund said, was he the only member of his unit to have read the transcripts. “Everybody saw these,” said Forslund, now retired after 26 years in the military.
    Forslund’s recollections are supported by those of two other Air Force intelligence specialists, working in widely separate locations, who say they also saw the transcripts of the attacking Israeli pilots’ communications.”
    etc..
    http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/bal-liberty1002,0,2758369,full.story
    2. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB24/nsa10.pdf
    Self-evident.

  12. Clifford Kiracofe says:
    October 6, 2007 at 7:22 am

    Ray McGovern has a piece out on USS Liberty:
    “….Sir, Sergeant Bryce Lockwood, United States Marine Corps, retired. I am a member of the USS Liberty crew, Sir.”
    Catching my breath, I asked him if he would be willing to tell us what happened.
    “Sir, I have not been able to do that. It is hard. But it has been almost 40 years, and I would like to try this evening, Sir.”
    You could hear a pin drop for the next 15 minutes, as Lockwood gave us his personal account of what happened to him, his colleagues, and his ship on the afternoon of June 8, 1967. He was a linguist assigned to collect communications intelligence from the USS Liberty, which was among the ugliest – and most easily identifiable – ships in the fleet with antennae springing out in all directions.
    Lockwood told of the events of that fateful day, beginning with the six-hour naval and air surveillance of the Liberty by the Israeli navy and air force on the morning of June 8. After the air attacks including thousand-pound bombs and napalm, three sixty-ton torpedo boats lined up like a firing squad, pointing their torpedo tubes at the Liberty’s starboard hull. Lockwood had been ordered to throw the extremely sensitive cryptological equipment overboard and had just walked beyond the bulwark separating the NSA intelligence unit from the rest of the ship when, he recalled, he sensed a large black object, a tremendous explosion, and sheet of flame. The torpedo had struck dead center in the NSA space.
    The cold, oily water brought Lockwood back to consciousness. Around him were 25 dead colleagues; but he heard moaning. Three were still alive; one of Lockwood’s shipmates dragged one survivor up the hatch. Lockwood was able to lift the two others, one-by-one, onto his shoulder and carry them up through the hatch. This meant alternatively banging on the hatch for someone to open it and swimming back to fish his shipmate out of the water lest he float out to sea through the 39-foot hole made by the torpedo.
    At that Lockwood stopped speaking. It was enough. Hard, very hard – even after almost 40 years.
    ….”
    etc.
    http://www.antiwar.com/mcgovern/?articleid=11719

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