Secrecy News: Army Study Criticizes Bush; Arab-Israeli War, USS Liberty Report
Secrecy News: Army Study Criticizes
Bush; Arab-Israeli War, USS Liberty Report
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In its "global war on terrorism," the Bush Administration has mistakenly
conflated several distinct types of national security threats into
a single monolithic threat, according to a new study published by
the U.S.
Army, and "in so doing ... may have set the United States on a
course of open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and nonstate
entities that pose no serious threat to the United States."
"Of particular concern has been the conflation of al-Qaeda and Saddam
Hussein's Iraq
as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat. This was a strategic
error of the first order because it ignored critical differences between
the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence
and military action."
"The war against Iraq was not integral to the [war
on terrorism], but rather a detour from it," the Army study concludes.
The study was reported today in the Washington Post and the Los
Angeles Times.
See "Bounding
the Global War on Terrorism" by Jeffrey Record, originally published
by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, December
2003.
NEW FRUS VOLUME ON 1967 ARAB-ISRAEL WAR
The Department of State today published the latest volume in its
official Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS)
documentary series on U.S. foreign policy, focusing on the 1967
Arab-Israeli War.
"The volume documents U.S. policy immediately before, during, and
after the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war and includes newly declassified
documentation on the USS Liberty incident," referring to the 1967
attack on a U.S. naval vessel by Israeli forces in which 34 American
lives were lost.
The Liberty incident was the subject of an excruciating and
occasionally quite nasty session at a conference on the new
FRUS volume at the U.S. State Department today.
Among numerous noteworthy items, the new FRUS volume includes
excerpts from the President's Daily Brief relating to the 1967
war.
An editorial note says that the PDB excerpts were "improperly
declassified and released." Furthermore, the State Department
editors assert, "The declassification and release of this
information in no way impacts or controls the declassification
status of the remainder of this PDB, other PDBs, or the PDB as
a series" (document 151, footnote 1).
In fact, however, the declassification and release of these PDB
excerpts demonstrates that such information can be declassified
with no adverse effect on national security, contrary to White
House claims.
