New Pentagon Papers? NOT!!
By Larry Johnson on July 27, 2010 at 1:54 AM in Current Affairs
Some have suggested that the leak of tactical information about the war in Afghanistan represents a 21st Century version of the Pentagon Papers. Horseshit! Richard Tofel provides an excellent analysis:
What’s crucially different from the Pentagon Papers
In terms of important disclosures, it’s not even close, with the historical importance of today’s documents likely to be relatively minor, and that of the Pentagon Papers enormous. The most significant revelations today include the Taliban’s limited use of heat-seeking missiles (which had been previously reported, though little-noticed), and the Pakistani intelligence service’s constant double-dealing and occasional cooperation with the Taliban (long the subject of news stories, and even of some official complaints).
In 1971, in contrast, the Pentagon Papers revealed a host of important discrepancies between the public posture of the U.S. government with respect to Vietnam and the truth — from the Truman administration, through the times of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson.
These included Johnson’s dissembling during the 1964 presidential campaign and in the run-up to the key decision in 1965 to send large numbers of combat troops, as well as confirmation of U.S. involvement in the 1963 coup against South Vietnamese premier Ngo Dinh Diem. And perhaps most famously, was the evidence that the administration had decided to escalate the war before the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution gave it the authority to do so.
There are many reasons for the differences between these two troves of documents, but perhaps the most important is that today’s documents provide a “ground-level” view of the war, while the Pentagon Papers offered a classic “top-down” perspective. Wars are fought on the ground, and the perspective such a view provides can be invaluable. But many of a war’s key secrets, especially in political terms, are generated at the top.
You can read the entire article here.
There are some additional points to consider. When the Vietnam war was ramping up under President Johnson there was a big split between the CIA analysts and the Pentagon. The CIA analysts believed that the number of North Vietnamese fighters was far larger than the military claimed. The main CIA analyst, Sam Adams, with the support of his boss, George Allen (not the football coach) faced enormous pressure to provide analysis that supported the military claims.
Adams was in the CIA from 1963 until 1973, but grew frustrated with the perversion of intelligence to meet political objectives. He claimed U.S. Army General William C. Westmoreland had conspired to minimize Vietnamese enemy troop strength in 1967. In 1982 Adams provided critical evidence to CBS News reporters who made the documentary “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception”. General Westmoreland subsequently sued both Adams and CBS News for libel, but the case was settled privately.
He testified for the defense in the espionage trial of Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony J. Russo, accused in connection with the illegal transmission of the Pentagon papers, a secret Government-sponsored history of the Vietnam War. Citing Government misconduct, a Federal judge dismissed all charges against the two. Mr. Adams told the court in that trial that he believed there had been political pressures in the military to depict the North Vietnamese and Vietcong in 1967 as weaker than they actually were. After visiting South Vietnam four times between 1966 and 1967, Mr. Adams concluded that senior military intelligence officers were underestimating the strength of the enemy, perhaps by half. He argued for a higher troop count, but late in 1967 the C.I.A. reached an agreement with the military on lower figures. Adams responded with an internal memorandum calling the agreement a monument of deceit. In January 1968, after the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the CIA adopted an enemy count along the lines he had recommended. By then, he had left the Vietnamese affairs staff in protest, and was concentrating on Cambodia.
In 1969 Mr. Adams removed CIA documents to argue his case and buried them in the woods near his 250-acre (1.0 km2) farm in Virginia. After his resignation from the agency in 1973, he sought the support of other intelligence officials to prove that there was a Saigon cover-up. From the massive chronologies Mr. Adams compiled, he detailed his allegations in a Harper’s Magazine article in 1975. He also testified before the House Select Committee on Intelligence, which reached conclusions similar to his own. The Sam Adams Award for integrity in intelligence is named after Adams.
I was trained as an analyst by George Allen. George told our “New Analyst” course about the enormous pressure he received from the White House to be a “team player.” George received phone calls from Administration officials, such as McGeorge Bundy, pressuring him to change the CIA analysis. We now know that the analysis being produced by Sam Adams was on target. George told us that his major regret was that he did not push back harder against the political pressure coming from the White House. He had two kids in college and was afraid he would lose his job if he resisted the pressure.
Sam Adams, however, did not have that worry. He was wealthy. He had family money. He could lose his job and still survive. He put it all on the line in insisting on reporting facts.
There is no major dispute in the analytical community on the war in Afghanistan. We do not face a massive Army akin to the North Vietnamese. We don’t face a monolithic threat, as we did in Vietnam. The latest data dump of leaked documents is extremely misleading. It shows a picture of the war that pre-dates the shift in strategy and commitment of resources that took place in the summer of 2008. Folks need to calm down and recognize that the Obama Administration, despite its waffling, is pursuing a strategy that will pay positive dividends. We need to be patient.
by Ronald Scott
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