[Kabar-indonesia] CIA Closes bin Laden Unit [+America the Untethered; & A Century of Intervention]

[Joyo at aol.com]

4 articles:

- C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden

- NY Times Magazine: America the Untethered

- WP: Rice Defining Her Own Sphere of Influence

- NYT: A Century of Intervention, Regarded With a Cold
  Eye

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The New York Times
Tuesday, July 4, 2006

C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden

By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, July 3 — The Central Intelligence Agency
has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of
hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants,
intelligence officials confirmed Monday.

The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late
last year and its analysts reassigned within the
C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said.

The decision is a milestone for the agency, which
formed the unit before Osama bin Laden became a
household name and bolstered its ranks after the Sept.
11 attacks, when President Bush pledged to bring Mr.
bin Laden to justice "dead or alive."

The realignment reflects a view that Al Qaeda is no
longer as hierarchical as it once was, intelligence
officials said, and a growing concern about
Qaeda-inspired groups that have begun carrying out
attacks independent of Mr. bin Laden and his top
deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Agency officials said that tracking Mr. bin Laden and
his deputies remained a high priority, and that the
decision to disband the unit was not a sign that the
effort had slackened. Instead, the officials said, it
reflects a belief that the agency can better deal with
high-level threats by focusing on regional trends
rather than on specific organizations or individuals.

"The efforts to find Osama bin Laden are as strong as
ever," said Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, a C.I.A.
spokeswoman. "This is an agile agency, and the
decision was made to ensure greater reach and focus."

The decision to close the unit was first reported
Monday by National Public Radio.

Michael Scheuer, a former senior C.I.A. official who
was the first head of the unit, said the move
reflected a view within the agency that Mr. bin Laden
was no longer the threat he once was.

Mr. Scheuer said that view was mistaken.

"This will clearly denigrate our operations against Al
Qaeda," he said. "These days at the agency, bin Laden
and Al Qaeda appear to be treated merely as first
among equals."

In recent years, the war in Iraq has stretched the
resources of the intelligence agencies and the
Pentagon, generating new priorities for American
officials. For instance, much of the military's
counterterrorism units, like the Army's Delta Force,
had been redirected from the hunt for Mr. bin Laden to
the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed
last month in Iraq.

An intelligence official who was granted anonymity to
discuss classified information said the closing of the
bin Laden unit reflected a greater grasp of the
organization. "Our understanding of Al Qaeda has
greatly evolved from where it was in the late 1990's,"
the official said, but added, "There are still people
who wake up every day with the job of trying to find
bin Laden."

Established in 1996, when Mr. bin Laden's calls for
global jihad were a source of increasing concern for
officials in Washington, Alec Station operated in a
similar fashion to that of other agency stations
around the globe.

The two dozen staff members who worked at the station,
which was named after Mr. Scheuer's son and was housed
in leased offices near agency headquarters in northern
Virginia, issued regular cables to the agency about
Mr. bin Laden's growing abilities and his desire to
strike American targets throughout the world.

In his book "Ghost Wars," which chronicles the
agency's efforts to hunt Mr. bin Laden in the years
before the Sept. 11 attacks, Steve Coll wrote that
some inside the agency likened Alec Station to a cult
that became obsessed with Al Qaeda.

"The bin Laden unit's analysts were so intense about
their work that they made some of their C.I.A.
colleagues uncomfortable," Mr. Coll wrote. Members of
Alec Station "called themselves 'the Manson Family'
because they had acquired a reputation for crazed
alarmism about the rising Al Qaeda threat."

Intelligence officials said Alec Station was disbanded
after Robert Grenier, who until February was in charge
of the Counterterrorist Center, decided the agency
needed to reorganize to better address constant
changes in terrorist organizations.

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The New York Times Sunday Magazine
July 2, 2006

America the Untethered

By DAVID RIEFF

National holidays, like the Olympics or the World Cup,
are times when national differences inevitably take
center stage. It would be as unreasonable to expect a
French person to care deeply about the Fourth of July
celebration in the United States as it would be to
expect an American to be stirred by the annual 14th of
July military parade down the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
Another way of putting this is to say that for all the
loose talk about America's exceptional place in the
world — talk that tends to be positive at home and
increasingly negative abroad — every nation, not just
the United States, considers itself exceptional to
some extent.

"America Against the World," a recent book based on
comprehensive polling data from the Pew Research
Center's Global Attitudes Project, makes the point
that our exceptionalism is not exceptional with
particular force. While a robust 60 percent of
Americans agree with the proposition that "our culture
is superior to others," such self-confidence pales
next to that of South Korea and Indonesia, where some
90 percent of the population assents to the idea. The
book's authors, Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes, also
note that "poll after poll finds the Japanese to be
the most pessimistic of people, expressing far less
satisfaction with their lot in life than might be
expected given their relatively high per capita
incomes. Yet, compared to other Asians, the Japanese
are, like Americans, highly self-reliant and
distrustful of government and, like Europeans,
secular. It is the Japanese public, not the American
public, that is most exceptional in the world."

And yet even if America is not more anomalous than a
number of other countries, our anomalies are what make
the difference in contemporary global affairs. Ever
since the time of Tocqueville, observers have
commented on various peculiar characteristics of the
American people: their belief in the power of the
will, their suspicion of government, their conviction
in their own benevolence. Of course, some facets of
American exceptionalism are more recent in origin. For
example, our particular focus on terrorism has
everything to do with the entirely warranted sense of
vulnerability that we all felt after 9/11. But the Pew
surveys make clear that there's much more to America's
exceptionalism than that. For example, while people in
most of the world look to government to solve their
problems, Americans do not. They are strongly attached
to their belief in individual responsibility and
unwilling to hold "outside factors" responsible for
failure in life. Indeed, the American commitment to
such beliefs appears to be becoming stronger with
time. In this respect, at least, we are becoming more
different.

Does all of this make American exceptionalism a vital
national resource or a serious problem, both for the
world as a whole and for the United States in
particular? However appealing our individualism and
positive thinking may be, such traits easily translate
in the global context into hubris and a refusal to
cooperate with others — in other words, into
unilateralism. Americans may cherish in themselves
what, in the military, is called the "hoo-ah" spirit —
an optimistic mind-set that, as Kohut and Stokes put
it, fosters the belief that "technology, and
Americans, can fix anything." But in our soberer, less
celebratory moments, we know that there are no
unilateral American solutions to multilateral problems
and that most of the great challenges we face in
today's world are multilateral — from terrorism to
global warming, and AIDS to mass migration. In the
streets of Baghdad and the deserts of Al Anbar, we
have learned that optimism and self-reliance are
simply not enough. In fairness, recent efforts by
critics to lay our hubris at the Bush administration's
door fall wide of the mark. Our particular sense of
national entitlement, of being specially chosen, is a
bipartisan affair. After all, it was Madeleine
Albright who, while serving as Bill Clinton's
secretary of state, declared the United States to be
"the indispensable nation."

Obviously, the United States will remain strong enough
to exercise considerable power for the foreseeable
future. In the medium term, however, an America that
does not understand — and makes little effort to
understand — why it has become so unpopular abroad is
almost certain to find itself both disliked and
ineffective in many parts of the world. Indeed, just
last month, the Pew Global Attitudes Project issued a
new survey showing that anti-Americanism, which seemed
to be in decline a year ago, is again on the rise. By
41 percent to 34 percent, a plurality of Britons
believe that the U.S. military presence in Iraq is a
greater danger to world peace than the government of
Iran — this in Tony Blair's Britain, supposedly
America's staunchest ally. The Bush administration
clearly realizes that such findings are not good news
and has greatly toned down its earlier unilateralist
swagger.

Of course, if unilateralism is a dead end,
multilateralism is no panacea — as the current impasse
with Iran demonstrates. But we have to start
somewhere. Simply to repeat that we live in a
post-9/11 world, while the Europeans have not yet
heard the bad news — in other words, waiting for our
allies to come around to seeing things as we do in the
United States — is unlikely to do anything but
aggravate the differences that already exist. Even
during the cold war, when America was a creditor
nation and its allies largely accepted their subaltern
status, the United States needed the assent of its
global partners. Unilateralism is still less of an
option today — something we should not lose sight of
on even that most "unilateralist" of holidays, the
Fourth of July.

David Rieff, a contributing writer, last wrote for the
magazine about Mexico's presidential race.

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Washington Post
Tuesday, July 4, 2006

Defining Her Own Sphere of Influence

Rice's Popularity Crosses Borders and Party Lines
Thanks to Careful Attention to Image

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 4, 2006; A03

When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced
that the administration was willing to join
negotiations on Iran's nuclear program, she did not go
to the drab State Department briefing room. Instead,
in full view of the television cameras, she strolled
about 50 feet to the microphones set up in the middle
of the vast and ornate Benjamin Franklin Room, evoking
a visual of the president walking through the White
House to the East Room for a prime-time news
conference.

The setting of the Iran announcement at the end of May
was no accident, but intended to demonstrate the
seriousness of the administration's policy shift.
Careful attention to stage-managed images has helped
define Rice's tenure at the State Department,
including the way she meets foreign guests in front of
the cameras and how her staff has arranged for
celebrities from other countries to meet her at
airports overseas.

This picture of the hard-working secretary of state on
the move appears to be integral to her growing clout
and her status as the most popular Cabinet member in a
beleaguered administration.

Rice's job-approval rating in a Harris survey last
month was 20 percentage points higher than that of
President Bush. A Washington Post poll of 1,000 adults
conducted last month suggests that public appeal is
based on both a reputation for professionalism and an
ability to avoid being identified with the
administration's most unpopular decisions. Although
she was Bush's national security adviser during the
Iraq invasion, a large percentage of those surveyed --
including opponents of the war -- say she had little
or nothing to do with the problems in Iraq.

"She is able to use external leverage created by her
public popularity to win internal struggles" such as
the change in posture toward Iran, said Derek Chollet,
who helped former secretaries James A. Baker III and
Warren Christopher write their memoirs. "I would
definitely rank her as one of the most effective
secretaries in increasing the public image of her
office, which enhances the State Department and
improves the image of the secretary of state around
the world."

Rice's celebrity overseas may be even more pronounced
than in the United States, making her a truly global
figure. In Kiev last December, for instance,
university students sat rapt as Rice answered
questions about her "recipe for success" and what it
meant to be the "most influential woman" working for
Bush. On a trip to Baghdad in April, Abdul Aziz
al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq, the largest Shiite political
party, pulled Rice aside to ask if she would write a
note to his granddaughter.

Esquire magazine, for its July issue, asked more than
1,000 men to choose among 14 notable women who they
would most want to attend a dinner party. Rice placed
first, ahead of Oprah Winfrey, Angelina Jolie, Julia
Roberts and Jennifer Aniston. Rice told the Greensboro
(N.C.) News & Record that she was stunned at the
result. "I'm not sure I would choose me," she said.

In the Post survey, twice as many people had a
favorable opinion about Rice as viewed her
unfavorably, while other recent surveys have found
that majorities of Americans have negative impressions
of Bush and Vice President Cheney. Of those who have a
favorable view of Rice, a majority said it was mostly
because of her professional abilities, rather than the
policies she supported.

This impression extended to Democrats and independents
interviewed; more than seven of 10 cited either Rice's
professional abilities or her personal qualities as
the reason for their favorable impression.

These positive impressions have made Rice a viable
contender in the 2008 presidential race, though she
routinely tries to play down speculation that she
would consider running. In the Post survey, 54 percent
said they would either definitely vote for her or
consider voting for her.

Without encouragement from Rice, grass-roots campaigns
have sprung up to encourage her to run, though she
insists she wants to return to California and
teaching.

Mark McKinnon, who was Bush's media adviser in 2000
and 2004, said Rice has almost unlimited political
potential, should she decide to change roles.

"She's a superfecta: a Republican, a woman, an African
American and secretary of state," he said. "I don't
think there's a hotter star on the Republican
political horizon than Condi Rice."

McKinnon said he believes that Rice "will not be a
candidate for president in 2008, but that she
absolutely will be on the short list for vice
president. Especially if Hillary [Rodham Clinton] is
the [Democratic] nominee, but I think in any case."

Rice's high public standing in the face of the
administration's problems has been a source of pride
for her staff, but officials declined to cooperate in
the preparation of this article. State Department
spokesman Sean McCormack would not comment.

As national security adviser, Rice appeared frequently
on television as an occasionally stiff defender of the
president's policies. But she appeared to achieve
stardom early in her tenure as secretary of state
when, a month after taking the post, she was
photographed walking past hundreds of cheering
soldiers in Germany wearing a black skirt, a black
coat and knee-high black boots that evoked the movie
"The Matrix." Rice routinely wears expensive and
flashy designer outfits in her travels.

Rice is especially effective in town-hall-style
meetings in which she engages in extended
give-and-take with the audience. She still delivers
many of her speeches in the pedantic style of a former
university professor, but her staff has learned to
keep the speeches relatively short (about 20 minutes)
so she can then take questions for 40 minutes.

Overseas, Rice uses her personal story of growing up
in the segregated South to demonstrate humility about
the American experience. She will frequently note that
"my ancestors in Mr. Jefferson's Constitution were
three-fifths of a man." In Sydney earlier this year,
there was an audible gasp from the nearly all-white
crowd when she said she did not have a white classmate
until she moved to Denver in 10th grade.

Rice combines her personal touch with an unusually
close relationship with the president. She was
extraordinarily close to Bush as national security
adviser and still speaks to him at least once a day,
if not more.

Rice's predecessor, Colin L. Powell, was personally
popular from his previous role as chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, but he did not have a close
partnership with Bush, and as secretary he did not
have a feel for visual flair.

Rice has traveled about 490,000 miles in the 17 months
since becoming secretary -- it took Powell twice as
long to compile such mileage -- including a
31,000-mile slog through Latin America and Asia that
appears to be the longest single trip ever made by a
secretary of state.

But Rice has combined the travel with an unusual
attention to visual detail, intended to show viewers
at home that she is working and those overseas that
she cares about their cultural traditions.

To highlight a new effort to reach out to Europe after
the tensions of the Iraq invasion, Rice combined a
groundbreaking speech in Paris -- at the alma mater of
French President Jacques Chirac -- with a visit to the
Hector Berlioz Conservatory. The local news media
avidly covered her as she watched children perform. A
trip to India included a stop at a cultural icon,
Humayun's Tomb in New Delhi, which resulted in
coverage across South Asia and large photo displays in
U.S. newspapers.

Rice's trips have included photos of her watching
potential Chinese Olympians ice skating in Beijing,
visiting a top-secret facility carved into a mountain
near Seoul that would direct a war with North Korea
and awarding the medals for the women's breaststroke
competition (an Australian specialty) during the
Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Australia.

"The day-to-day of diplomacy is not important to
people," said James B. Steinberg, dean of the LBJ
School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas
and a State Department and White House official in the
Clinton administration. But such images are effective
because ordinary Americans "find it appealing. They
can relate to it more than pictures of people in suits
going to meetings."

Rice has added an unusual innovation, at the urging of
former senior adviser Jim Wilkinson: cultural airport
greeters. Instead of being met by protocol chiefs or
foreign ministers, Rice's office has requested that
the secretary be met by a country's pop culture
heroes, especially sports or music stars, guaranteeing
extensive coverage by the local media. Because Rice
tends to arrive at night, this also ensures that she
is already on the front page of the morning newspapers
when she arrives for meetings with top officials.

In Tokyo, Rice was met at the airport by Konishiki, a
sumo champion. A photo of the 600-pound wrestler
hugging the much smaller Rice even appeared on the
front page of the Financial Times.

In Romania, she was met by Olympic legend Nadia
Comaneci, young Romanian Olympic gymnasts and Special
Olympians. And in Belgium, the media widely covered
her meeting with cyclist Eddy Merckx, who won the Tour
de France five times.

She has also met with musical heroes, such as in
Seoul, when she was greeted by both a matronly singer
of traditional Korean music and a young pop star in
baggy, ripped jeans.

Staff writer Dan Balz and assistant director of
polling Claudia Deane contributed to this report.

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TheNew York Times
May 2, 2006

Books of The Times | 'Overthrow'

A Century of Intervention, Regarded With a Cold Eye

By RICHARD K. BETTS

By Stephen Kinzer's count, the United States has
toppled foreign governments 14 times in the 110 years
between the 1893 coup in Hawaii and the occupation of
Iraq, making regime change by force as American as
apple pie. But Mr. Kinzer says the results are always
damaging to the countries involved, and to American
security as well.

Mr. Kinzer, formerly a foreign correspondent for The
New York Times, has written on this subject before, in
books on United States intervention in Iran and
Guatemala. In "Overthrow" he surveys all 14 cases in
an admirably written page-turner.

Although the book does not add to historical knowledge
of the individual cases, it may be the first to bring
them together in a comparison over time. This makes
the narrative more interesting than a single case
study, but also more depressing.

In Mr. Kinzer's treatment there are no bright spots.
In one instance after another, arrogant Americans are
shown tossing out legitimate governments and
installing corrupt brutes who turn out to cause more
problems for foreign policy than did the ousted
leaders.

Mr. Kinzer's main explanation for these recurrent
misadventures is greed. The prime villains are United
Fruit, ITT, Aramco, Halliburton and other corporations
and plutocrats operating through like-minded
officials. He proceeds from the classic theory first
advanced by the British economist J. A. Hobson, and
most prominently in Lenin's "Imperialism, the Highest
Stage of Capitalism," that overproduction causes a
scramble for new markets and "a policy of forcing
foreign nations to buy American products." This may be
convincing for the early cases, but Mr. Kinzer
underestimates the relative force of geopolitical
concerns during the cold war, when, he claims,
economic motives played just as strong a role as ever.

Actually Mr. Kinzer cannot quite make up his mind. At
the beginning he contends that things like spreading
democracy, Christianizing heathen nations,
"establishing military bases around the world and
bringing foreign governments under American control
were never ends in themselves" but were "ways for the
United States to assure itself access to the markets,
resources and investment potential of distant lands."
But later he says, "Americans overthrew governments
only when economic interests coincided with
ideological ones," and details cases in which
intervention came not just from greed but from
humanitarian hubris as well. At the outset he
discounts moralism, but later he credits "the power of
the noble idea of American exceptionalism."

The easy answer is that everything mattered, but
without clarifying which causes are necessary or
sufficient, the story does not tell us which levers we
should look to first to change the pattern.

We should not ask good journalism to proceed like
social science, but on especially controversial cases
more fastidious analysis would help. Consider Chile.
Mr. Kinzer emphasizes that his book covers only cases
where the United States role was decisive in deposing
governments, not those where American agents played
"subsidiary roles." On this basis he refuses to count
the coup against the right-wing Dominican dictator
Rafael Trujillo, even though the United States
supplied weapons to plotters at one point, direct
action beyond what the United States did in 1973 to
help bring down the president of Chile, Salvador
Allende, which is covered in the book.

Washington can be tagged with a decisive role in the
Chile coup only by blurring together the events of
1970 and 1973. In 1970 President Richard M. Nixon did
encourage a coup to prevent Allende from taking office
after the Chilean election, but the scheme failed.
Although plotters accidentally killed the army
commander, the coup never got off the ground.

In the next three years Washington undertook covert
action programs that funneled money to anti-Allende
newspapers, parties and private groups. The definitive
investigation under Senator Frank Church, however,
found no evidence that the United States instigated or
aided the military coup.

Mr. Kinzer notes that a truckers' strike that
contributed to disorder preceding the coup was
"supported in part by C.I.A. funds," but he does not
report that these funds were diverted, against C.I.A.
rules, by a private-sector group that had received
them for other purposes. American intelligence got
advance warning of the coup, but in the weeks
beforehand almost everyone in Chile knew it was
coming.

The horrors of the Pinochet regime, the movie
"Missing," the record of previous covert actions and
Nixon's happiness with Allende's ouster generated the
folklore that Washington had done to Allende just what
it did to Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala.
But no such evidence has yet come to light, even in
the 17,000 pages of documents declassified in the
Clinton administration. Among those, as the Latin
America specialist Mark Falcoff has pointed out, were
secret recordings of Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger
supporting their claim that the United States did not
have a hand in the coup.

Distinctions between coup support and other covert
actions may strike some as hair splitting. But the
difference is significant, and readers should remember
that some assertions about the record are more
controversial, and reality more complex, than a broad
survey conveys. If the record of his 13 other cases is
clear of such confusions, however, the overall story
is just as bad, and sad, as Mr. Kinzer says.

Richard K. Betts is director of the Saltzman Institute
of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University, and
adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations.

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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