“As with most baby boomers, the murder of JFK was a signature moment in my life,” O’Reilly, the top-rated Fox News talk show host and a former high school history teacher, said in a statement. “’Killing Kennedy’ will answer many questions about the president and why his life was cut short.”

What sort of answer will O’Reilly provide to the fundamental and extremely controversial question about why Kennedy died? Will he perpetuate the mainstream media’s near-constant advocacy of the lone-nut scenario? O’Reilly did not even hint at how he would handle it or whether he has any new information.

Yet another book by O’Reilly, his recent “Killing Lincoln,” was, as some reviewers noted, more like a John Grisham rendition of the tragedy than the work of an investigative journalist or scholar intent on major breakthroughs—or even deeper understanding.

OBLIVION

Let’s compare the nature of O’Reilly’s current bestseller fare, and the media’s receptivity to it, with journalism done some years back, again on the JFK assassination—by the very same Bill O’Reilly. The earlier work had some major, groundbreaking revelations—and legitimate, very hot content, based on reporting conducted in the early 1990s. It will come as a surprise, because most of us never heard about the show’s revelations—not at the time, and not since. There’s a reason: the highly disturbing, even threatening evidence of a mostly unexplored link between Oswald and U.S. government agents.

Watch Bill O’Reilly below, back when he hosted the syndicated television show Inside Edition:

Key excerpts:

“O’REILLY: Living in Dallas, Oswald was befriended by Russian-born George de Mohrenschildt. Investigators determined he was a contract agent for the CIA in Central America and the Caribbean. In 1977, moments before he was to be interviewed by House investigators, de Mohrenschildt blew his brains out with a 20-gauge shotgun. House investigators believe he was a crucial link between the CIA and Lee Harvey Oswald.

There is no question that the sealed JFK Files are extremely embarrassing for the CIA. House investigators have told Inside Edition that the Agency did not fully cooperate in their investigation and that the CIA had final say in the final report that the House Assassinations Committee made public. Thus the public report makes no mention of the CIA’s links with Lee Harvey Oswald. But the secret documents are another story.

…House investigators uncovered evidence that the CIA planted nine agents inside the Garrison investigation to feed him false information and to report back to Langley what Garrison was finding out.

That was explosive content, and O’Reilly was prepared for major press interest in this scoop. That’s not, however, the way things played out. Jerry Policoff, who interviewed O’Reilly back in those days for an article in the alternative newsweekly The Village Voice remembers:

“He thought the piece was so important that he held a press conference to promote it. Of course no mainstream media showed up. He expressed his astonishment to USA Today, and I interviewed him as a follow-up. He repeated to me that he could not understand how the media could not even show up at a press conference on such an important issue.

Ok – so that was Bill O’Reilly back then, in the 1990s, before he became a breakout star. Will O’Reilly’s new Kennedy book really tell us why he died?

Not likely, if we consider what it took for O’Reilly to make it big-time.

One pundit, who used to appear on Fox a lot in O’Reilly’s first years there. recalls a producer mentioning that O’Reilly wanted to continue doing JFK assassination reports, but that network chief Roger Ailes and other top management “kept stepping on the story.”

Years later, O’Reilly is on a roll that is likely to continue—provided he plays his cards right.

The lesson is this: Listen to the higher-ups, don’t step on the wrong toes, and you, too, can make it to the top.

We look forward to seeing if today’s O’Reilly takes inspiration from his younger, feistier self in probing beneath the official story of the Kennedy assassination. But we’re not holding our breath.

A look at the events leading up to the “uprising” — and a consideration of the historical background–suggests that the war was never about the stated humanitarian objectives. Rather, humanitarian appeals were used to mask less acceptable purposes — a range of geopolitical motives shared by the leading NATO countries, that, as is so often the case with military action, is concerned principally with oil supplies and other strategic concerns.

A raw land grab is not politically correct in today’s world, and so the American and European publics were presented with something far more palatable: a desire to do the right thing. This hoary story line worked with a complacent media, but it doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny. Let’s start with the official justification for NATO’s launch of its bombing campaign — for without that campaign, it’s highly improbable the rebels could ever have toppled Gadhafi. We were told from the beginning that the major purpose of what was to be limited bombing — indeed, its sole purpose — was to protect those Libyan civilians rebelling against an oppressive regime from massive retaliation by Gadhafi. Perhaps because of NATO’s initial intervention, the feared genocidal bloodletting never did occur. However, protecting civilians apparently didn’t generate sufficient public support for intervention, so we started to hear about other purported reasons for it. Gadhafi was encouraging his soldiers to commit mass rape! And giving them Viagra! And condoms!

You can’t make this sort of thing up. And yet that’s just what the NATO crew did — made it up. The media, always glad to have a “sexy” story, especially a sick sexy story, even a sick sexy story with no evidence to back it up, covered this ad nauseam, but never bothered to find out if it was true.

We’ve been expressing doubts about these claims (see this and this and this.) But it’s tough to counterpoise hot-button issues with rationality. If you questioned the mass rape story, you were a “rape-enabler.” If you pointed out that Gadhafi was being bombed for anything other than humanitarian reasons, you were a “Gadhafi-lover.”

The media was so gullible that the professional disinformation guys went onto auto-pilot, recycling tired old tropes that nobody ought to be buying anymore. For example, most news outlets reported recently that Libya had fired a SCUD missile at the rebels.

“That it didn’t hit anything or kill anyone is not the point. It’s a weapon of mass destruction that Col. Gadhafi is willing to train on his own people,” said one Western official.

If the effort to rally public opinion against Gadhafi centered on any one factor, it was fury over Libya’s purported role in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. As we noted in a previous article, in the years since the conviction of a Libyan intelligence officer in the tragedy, a chorus of doubts has grown steadily. The doubt is based on new forensic evidence and research, plus subsequent claims by prosecution witnesses that their testimony was the result of threats, bribes, or other forms of coercion. It is an ugly and disturbing story, not well known to the larger news audience.

Lockerbie

Yet Lockerbie has continued to touch nerves. In February, when Gadhafi’s Justice Minister turned against him and became a rebel leader, he brought with him dynamite. Mustafa Mohamed Abud Al Jeleil made the dramatic claim that his ex-boss was the culprit behind the bombing of Pan Am 103. He asserted that he had proof of Gadhafi giving the direct order for the crime. This got considerable media attention, though almost no news organizations followed up or reported that Jeleil never did supply that proof. The Libyan convicted of the crime has consistently denied any involvement. Nonetheless, his conviction in the case has had Gadhafi on the defensive for years — and working hard to prove to the West that he can be a “good citizen.” Part of this has entailed his paying out huge sums in reparations.

***

From the beginning of the Libya saga in February until now, the NATO coalition has never wavered from its initial declaration of humanitarian motives. And, to be sure, we may still learn of horrible, previously-unknown atrocities by Gadhafi. Still, the United States and its allies have little history of using their might strictly to protect civilians. If so, millions of South Sudanese, Rwandans and others might not be in their graves.

Besides, with all the talk about Gadhafi harming his citizens, what about the effect of more than 7000 — yes, seven thousand — NATO bombing runs? We heard constant reports about how Gadhafi was facing charges of “war crimes,” with never a word about NATO. To learn the impact of this massive unleashing, you had to be visiting little-known sources such as the Canadian website, Global Research, which often probes beyond official Western accounts of global interventions.

NATO bombing

Some Western military officials couldn’t even be bothered to participate in the “humanitarianism” charade. For example, the top British general explicitly stated that the objective was really to remove Gadhafi. Nobody — including the media — paid much attention to this admission, perhaps because it was already assumed to be the case.

Gadhafi should never be seen as a victim — indeed, he has always been sleazy and monstrous in various ways. But the US and its allies appear to have cared little about this, while being deeply troubled by his role as a fly in the geopolitical ointment. A look at the long and complex historical relationship between Gadhafi and the West begins to explain the true reason he had to go. It also dovetails perfectly with a growing body of indications that Western elites encouraged and even provoked the uprising — while tapping into deep discontent with the dictator.

To be sure, it is the kind of granular, heroic story that the public loves, that generates follow-up bestsellers and movie options. The takedown even has a Hollywood-esque code name: “Operation Neptune’s Spear.”

Here’s the introduction to the mission commander, full of minute details that help give it a ring of authenticity and the most intimate reportorial access:

James, a broad-chested man in his late thirties, does not have the lithe swimmer’s frame that one might expect of a SEAL — he is built more like a discus thrower. That night, he wore a shirt and trousers in Desert Digital Camouflage, and carried a silenced Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with extra ammunition; a CamelBak, for hydration; and gel shots, for endurance. He held a short-barrel, silenced M4 rifle. (Others SEALs had chosen the Heckler & Koch MP7.) A “blowout kit,” for treating field trauma, was tucked into the small of James’s back. Stuffed into one of his pockets was a laminated gridded map of the compound. In another pocket was a booklet with photographs and physical descriptions of the people suspected of being inside. He wore a noise-cancelling headset, which blocked out nearly everything besides his heartbeat.

On and on went the “tick-tock.” Yet as Paul Farhi, a Washington Post reporter, noted, that narrative was misleading in the extreme, because the New Yorker reporter never actually spoke to James — nor to a single one of James’s fellow SEALs (who have never been identified or photographed — even from behind — to protect their identity.) Instead, every word of Schmidle’s narrative was provided to him by people who were not present at the raid. Complains Farhi:

…a casual reader of the article wouldn’t know that; neither the article nor an editor’s note describes the sourcing for parts of the story. Schmidle, in fact, piles up so many details about some of the men, such as their thoughts at various times, that the article leaves a strong impression that he spoke with them directly.

That didn’t trouble New Yorker editor David Remnick, according to Farhi:

Remnick says he’s satisfied with the accuracy of the account. “The sources spoke to our fact-checkers,” he said. “I know who they are.”

But we don’t.

On a story of this gravity, should we automatically join in with the huzzahs because it has the imprimatur of America’s most respected magazine? Or would we be wise to approach it with caution?

***

Most of us are not the trusting naïfs we once were. And with good reason.

The list of consequential events packaged for us by media and Hollywood in unsatisfactory ways continues to grow. It starts, certainly, with the official version of the JFK assassination, widely discredited yet still carried forward by most major media organizations. (For more on that, see this.) More and more people realize that the heroic Woodward & Bernstein story of Nixon’s demise is deeply problematical. (I’ve written extensively on both of these in my book “Family of Secrets”.)

And untold millions don’t think we’ve heard the real (or at least complete) story of the phenomenal, complex success of those 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. Skeptics now include former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, who recently speculated that the hijackers may have been able to enter the US and move freely precisely because American intelligence hoped to recruit them as double agents — and that an ongoing cover-up is designed to hide this. And then, of course, there are the Pentagon’s account of the heroic rescue of Jessica Lynch in Iraq, which turned out to be a hoax, and the Pentagon’s fabricated account of the heroic battle death of former NFL player Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, who turned out to be a victim of friendly fire. These are just a few from scores of examples of deceit perpetrated upon the American people. Hardly the kind of track record to inspire confidence in official explanations with the imprimatur of the military and the CIA.

Whatever one thinks of these other matters, we’re certainly now at a point where we ought to be prudent in embracing authorized accounts of the latest seismic event: the dramatic end to one of America’s most reviled and storied nemeses.

The bin Laden raid presents us with every reason to be cautious. The government’s initial claims about what transpired at that house in Abbottabad have changed, then changed again, with no proper explanation of the discrepancies. Even making allowances for human error in such shifting accounts, almost every aspect of what we were told requires a willing suspension of disbelief — from the manner of Osama’s death and burial to the purported pornography found at the site. (For more on these issues, see previous articles we wrote on the subject, here, here and here.)

Clarke’s theory will seem less outrageous later, as we explore Saudi intelligence’s crucial, and bizarre, role at the end of bin Laden’s life — working directly with the man who now holds Clarke’s job.

Add to all of this the discovery that the reporter providing this newest account wasn’t even allowed to talk to any raid participants — and the magazine’s lack of candor on this point — and you’ve got an almost unassailable case for treating the New Yorker story with extreme caution.

***

We might begin by asking the question: Who provided the New Yorker with its exclusive, and what was their agenda in doing so? To try and sort out Schmidle’s sources, I read through the piece carefully several times.

One person who spoke to the reporter, and who is identified by name is John O. Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser. Brennan is quoted directly, briefly, near the top, describing to Schmidle pre-raid debate over whether such an operation would be a success or failure:

John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, told me that the President’s advisers began an “interrogation of the data, to see if, by that interrogation, you’re going to disprove the theory that bin Laden was there.”

The mere fact of Schmidle’s reliance on Brennan at all should send up a flare for the cautious reader. After all, that’s the very same Brennan who was the principal source of incorrect details in the hours and days after the raid. These included the claim that the SEALs encountered substantial armed resistance, not least from bin Laden himself; that it took them an astounding 40 minutes to get to bin Laden, and that the White House got to hear the soldiers’ conversations in real time.

Here’s a Washington Post account from Brennan published on May 3, less than 48 hours after the raid:

Half an hour had passed on the ground, but the American commandos raiding Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hideaway had yet to find their long-sought target.

…The commandos swept methodically through the compound’s main building, clearing one room and then another as they made their way to the upper floors where they expected to find bin Laden. As they did so, Obama administration officials in the White House Situation Room listened to the SEAL team’s conversations over secure lines.

“The minutes passed like days,” said John O. Brennan, the administration’s chief counterterrorism adviser. “It was probably one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time, I think, in the lives of the people who were assembled.”

Finally, shortly before 2 a.m. in Pakistan, the commandos burst into an upstairs room.Inside, an armed bin Laden took cover behind a woman, Brennan said. With a burst of gunfire, one of the longest and costliest manhunts in modern history was over.

.. The commandos moved inside, and finally reached bin Laden’s upstairs living quarters after nearly 40 minutes on the ground.

Almost all that turns out to be hogwash — according to the new account produced by the New Yorker three months later. An account that, again, it seems, comes courtesy of Brennan. The minutes did not pass like days. Bin Laden was not armed, and did not take cover behind a woman. And the commandoes most certainly were not on the ground for 40 minutes. Some of them were up the stairs to the higher floors almost in a flash, and it didn’t take long for them to run into and kill bin Laden.

For another take, consider this account from NBC News’ Pentagon correspondent — also reported the week after the raid — two days after Brennan told the Washington Post a completely different story. This one appears to be based on a briefing from military officials who would have been likely to have good knowledge of the operational details:

According to the officials’ account, as the first SEAL team moved into the compound, they took small-arms fire from the guest house in the compound. The SEALs returned fire, killing bin Laden’s courier and the courier’s wife, who died in the crossfire. It was the only time the SEALs were shot at.

The second SEAL team entered the first floor of the main residence and could see a man standing in the dark with one hand behind his back. Fearing he was hiding a weapon, the SEALs shot and killed the lone man, who turned out to be unarmed.

As the U.S. commandos moved through the house, they found several stashes of weapons and barricades, as if the residents were prepared for a violent and lengthy standoff — which never materialized.

The SEALs then made their way up a staircase, where they ran into one of bin Laden’s sons. The Americans immediately shot and killed the 19-year-old son, who was also unarmed, according to the officials.

Hearing the shots, bin Laden peered over the railing from the floor above. The SEALs fired but missed bin Laden, who ducked back into his bedroom. As the SEALs stormed up the stairs, two young girls ran from the room.

One SEAL scooped them up and carried them out of harm’s way. The other two commandos stormed into bin Laden’s bedroom. One of bin Laden’s wives rushed toward the Navy SEAL, who shot her in the leg.

Then, without hesitation, the same commando turned his gun on bin Laden, standing in what appeared to be pajamas, and fired two quick shots, one to the chest and one to the head. Although there were weapons in that bedroom, bin Laden was also unarmed when he was shot.

Instead of a chaotic firefight, the U.S. officials said, the American commando assault was a precision operation, with SEALs moving carefully through the compound, room to room, floor to floor.

In fact, most of the operation was spent in what the military calls “exploiting the site,” gathering up the computers, hard drives, cellphones and files that could provide valuable intelligence on al-Qaida operatives and potential operations worldwide.

The U.S. officials describing the operation said the SEALs carefully gathered up 22 women and children to ensure they were not harmed. Some of the women were put in “flexi-cuffs” the plastic straps used to bind someone’s hands at the wrists, and left them for Pakistani security forces to discover.

***

Given that Brennan’s initial version of the raid was strikingly erroneous, his later account to the New Yorker is suspect as well. So who else besides Brennan might have been Schmidle’s sources? At one point in his piece, he cites an unnamed counterterrorism official:

A senior counterterrorism official who visited the JSOC redoubt described it as an enclave of unusual secrecy and discretion. “Everything they were working on was closely held,” the official said.

Later, that same unnamed counterterrorism official is again cited, this time seeming to continue Brennan’s narrative of the meeting before the raid, in which participants disagreed on the likely success of such a mission:

That day in Washington, Panetta convened more than a dozen senior C.I.A. officials and analysts for a final preparatory meeting. Panetta asked the participants, one by one, to declare how confident they were that bin Laden was inside the Abbottabad compound. The counterterrorism official told me that the percentages “ranged from forty per cent to ninety or ninety-five per cent,” and added, “This was a circumstantial case.”

From the story’s construction, one could reasonably conclude that the unnamed counterterrorism official may indeed still just be Brennan. If not, who could it be? How many different white House counterterrorism officials would have debriefed the SEALs, if indeed that is even their role? How many would have been privy to that planning meeting? And how many different officials would have gotten authorization to sum up the events of that important day for this New Yorker writer? Also, it’s an old journalistic trick to quote the same source, on and off the record — thereby giving the source extra cover when discussing particularly delicate matters.

So, we don’t know whether the article was based on anything more than Brennan, under marching orders to clean up the conflicting accounts he originally put out.

UNEXPLAINED DISPUTES

It’s curious that the source chooses to emphasize the fundamental disagreement over whether the raid was a good idea. Presumably, there was a purpose in emphasizing this, but the New Yorker’s “tick-tock”, which is very light on analysis or context, doesn’t tell us what it was. It may have been intended to show Obama as brave, inclined toward big risks (thereby running counter to his reputation) — we can only guess.

This internal discord will get the attention of anyone who remembers all the assertions from intelligence officials over the years that bin Laden was almost certainly already dead — either of natural causes or killed at some previous time.

Here’s a bit more from the New Yorker’s on officials’ doubts going into the raid:

Several analysts from the National Counterterrorism Center were invited to critique the C.I.A.’s analysis; their confidence in the intelligence ranged between forty and sixty per cent. The center’s director, Michael Leiter, said that it would be preferable to wait for stronger confirmation of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.

Those doubts are particularly interesting for several reasons: the CIA has had a long history of disputes between its covert action wing, which tends to advocate activity, and its analysis section, historically prone to caution. The action wing also has a history of publicizing its being right — when it could purport to be right — and covering up its failures. So when an insider chooses to make public these disagreements, we should be willing to consider motives.

This dispute can also be seen as an intriguing prologue to the rush to dump Bin Laden’s body and not provide proof to the public that it was indeed bin Laden. What if it wasn’t bin Laden that they killed? Would the government announce that after such a high-stakes operation? (“While we thought he’d be there, we accidentally killed someone else instead“? Seems unlikely.)

***

Now, let us go to the next antechamber of this warren of shadowy entities and unstated agendas.

Who exactly wanted bin Laden shot rather than taken alive and interrogated — and why? There’s been much discussion about the purported reasons for terminating him on sight, but the fact remains that he would have been a source of tremendous intelligence of real value to the safety of Americans and others.

Yet, early in the piece, Schmidle writes:

If all went according to plan, the SEALs would drop from the helicopters into the compound, overpower bin Laden’s guards, shoot and kill him at close range, and then take the corpse back to Afghanistan.

That was the plan? Whose plan? We’ve never been explicitly told by the White House that such a decision had been made. In fact, we’d previously been informed that  the president was glad to have the master plotter taken alive if he was unarmed and did not resist. So, that’s a huge and problematical discrepancy that is only heightened by Schmidle’s misleadingly matter-of-fact treatment of the matter.

GET ME RIYADH

If the justification for killing Osama presented in the New Yorker’s warrants concern, the account of how — and why — they disposed of his body ought to send alarm bells clanging.

At the time of the raid, the decision to hastily dump Osama’s body in the ocean rather than make it available for authoritative forensic examination was a highly controversial one — that only led to more speculation that the White House was hiding something. The justifications, including not wanting to bury him on land for fear of creating a shrine, were almost laughable.

So what do we learn about this from the New Yorker? It’s truly bizarre: the SEALS themselves made the decision. That’s strange enough. But then we learn that Brennan took it upon himself to verify that was the right decision. How did he do this? Not by speaking with the president or top military, diplomatic or legal brass. No, he called some foreigners — get ready — the Saudis, who told him that dumping at sea sounded like a good plan.

Here’s Schmidle’s account:

All along, the SEALs had planned to dump bin Laden’s corpse into the sea — a blunt way of ending the bin Laden myth. They had successfully pulled off a similar scheme before. During a DEVGRU helicopter raid inside Somalia in September, 2009, SEALs had killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of East Africa’s top Al Qaeda leaders; Nabhan’s corpse was then flown to a ship in the Indian Ocean, given proper Muslim rites, and thrown overboard. Before taking that step for bin Laden, however, John Brennan made a call. Brennan, who had been a C.I.A. station chief in Riyadh, phoned a former counterpart in Saudi intelligence. Brennan told the man what had occurred in Abbottabad and informed him of the plan to deposit bin Laden’s remains at sea. As Brennan knew, bin Laden’s relatives were still a prominent family in the Kingdom, and Osama had once been a Saudi citizen. Did the Saudi government have any interest in taking the body? “Your plan sounds like a good one,” the Saudi replied.

Let’s consider this. The most wanted man in the world; substantive professional doubts about whether the man in the Abbottabad house is him; tremendous public doubts about whether it could even be him; the most important operation of the Obama presidency; yet the decision about what to do with the body is left to low-level operatives. Keep in mind SEALs are trained to follow orders given by others. They’re expected to apply what they know to unexpected scenarios that come up, but the key strategic decisions — arrived at in advance — are not theirs to make.

Even more strange that Brennan would discuss this with a foreign power. And not just any foreign power, but the regime that is inextricably linked with the domestically-influential family of bin Laden — and home to many of the hijackers who worked for him.

Is it just me, or does this sound preposterous? Obama’s Homeland Security and Counterterrorism adviser is just winging it with key aspects of one of America’s most important, complex and risky operations? And the Saudi government is the one deciding to discard the remains of a man from one of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful families, before the public could receive proper proof of the identity of the body? A regime with a great deal at stake and perhaps plenty to hide.

Also please consider this important caveat: As we noted in a previous article, the claim that the body had already been positively identified via DNA has been disputed by a DNA expert who said that insufficient time had elapsed before the sea burial to complete such tests.

The line about Brennan himself having been a former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia is just sort of dropped in there. No recognition of what it means that a person of that background was put into that position after 9/11, no recognition that a person of that background and those fraught personal connections is controlling this narrative. He’s not just a “counterterrorism expert” — he is a longtime member of an agency whose mandate includes the frequent use of disinformation. And one who has his own historic direct links to the Saudi regime, a key and problematical player in the larger chess game playing out.

It’s relevant to note that Brennan is not only a career CIA officer (they say no one ever really leaves the Agency, no matter their new title) but one with a lot of baggage. He was deputy director of the CIA at the time of the 9/11 attacks. He was an adviser to Obama’s presidential campaign, after which Obama initially planned to name him CIA director. That appointment was pulled, in part due to criticism from human rights advocates over statements he had made in support of sending terrorism suspects to countries where they might be tortured.

Of course, there could have been other sources besides Brennan. In addition to the unnamed “counterterrorism official” previously cited, the New Yorker mentions a “special operations officer,” as in:

…according to a special-operations officer who is deeply familiar with the bin Laden raid.

Subsequent quotes from him indicate that this had to be a supervisory special ops officer. His comments are surprising:

“This wasn’t a hard op,” the special-operations officer told me. “It would be like hitting a target in McLean” — the upscale Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C.

Whoops! Here’s a Special Ops guy saying the Special Ops raid was actually no big deal! Shouldn’t that, if a valid assessment, get more attention? Especially given the endless praise and frequent statements of how difficult the operation was. I mean, the toughness and diciness of the Abbottabad mission is the prime reason we want to read the New Yorker’s account in the first place!

To further underline the point, consider that this fellow is not alone in his assessment:

In the months after the raid, the media have frequently suggested that the Abbottabad operation was as challenging as Operation Eagle Claw and the “Black Hawk Down” incident, but the senior Defense Department official told me that “this was not one of three missions.”…. He likened the routine of evening raids to “mowing the lawn.”

Why would a person overseeing an operation like this deflate the bubble of adoration? It doesn’t seem helpful to the interests of Special Operations – and it doesn’t seem credible, either. So there’s presumably a reason that this person is — again speaking to the New Yorker’s after this important exclusive has been carefully considered and strategized. We just don’t know what it is, and the magazine doesn’t even bother to wonder.

***

Most of the other sources seem to play bit roles. One is “a senior adviser to the President” whose only comment is that Obama decided not to trust the Pakistanis with advance notice of the raid — which we already knew.  Another — named — source is Ben Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser, who does not evince any intimate knowledge of the raid itself.

The New Yorker’s also includes a few other officials who brief Schmidle on general background, like a “senior defense department official” explaining the overall relationship between Special Operations and CIA personnel, and a named former CIA counsel explaining that the Abottabad raid amounted to “a complete incorporation of JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] into a C.I.A. operation.”

That’s only slipped into the article, but it is perhaps one of the most important aspects of the piece, along with a brief mention of the way in which former Iraq/Afghan commander General David Petraeus has gone to CIA while CIA director Panetta has been made Defense Secretary. (For more on these important but confusing games of high-level musical chairs, which were not deeply scrutinized in the conventional media, see our WhoWhatWhy pieces here and here.)

This may sound too technical for your taste, but the takeaway point is that fundamental realignments are afoot in that vast, massively-funded, powerful and secretive part of the US government that is treated by the corporate press almost as if it does not exist. The tales of internal intrigue that we do not hear would begin to provide us with the real narratives that are not ours to have.

In the New Yorker’s piece, we do learn lots of things we did not know before — for example, that Special Ops considered tunneling in or coming in by foot rather than helicopter. We learn that CIA director Robert Gates wanted to drop massive bombs on the house. General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shared that view — Cartwright is one of the few who is directly identified as a source for Schmidle. That’s important stuff, and worth more than brief mention. And, once again, we need more effort to try and understand why we are being told these things.

“WE REALLY DIDN’T KNOW… WHAT WAS GOING ON”

About two-thirds of the article is a sort of scene-setter, a prologue to on-the-ground story we’ve all been waiting for. But when the big moment arrives, the New Yorker’s Schmidle instead punts:

Meanwhile, James, the squadron commander, had breached one wall, crossed a section of the yard covered with trellises, breached a second wall, and joined up with the SEALs from helo one, who were entering the ground floor of the house. What happened next is not precisely clear. “I can tell you that there was a time period of almost twenty to twenty-five minutes where we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on,” Panetta said later, on “PBS NewsHour.”

Until this moment, the operation had been monitored by dozens of defense, intelligence, and Administration officials watching the drone’s video feed. The SEALs were not wearing helmet cams, contrary to a widely cited report by CBS. None of them had any previous knowledge of the house’s floor plan, and they were further jostled by the awareness that they were possibly minutes away from ending the costliest manhunt in American history; as a result, some of their recollections — on which this account is based — may be imprecise and, thus, subject to dispute.

Schmidle claims that the SEALs’ “recollections — on which this account is based” — are subject to dispute. But as I’ve noted, the article is NOT based on their recollections, but on what some source claims to Schmidle were their recollections. Why the summary may be imprecise and thus subject to dispute after it has been filtered by a person controlling the scenario, must be asked. Perhaps this is why the New Yorker is not permitted to speak directly to the SEALs — because of what they could tell the magazine.

Now, killing the men who lived in the compound: First, the SEALs shot and killed the courier, who they say was armed, and his wife, who they say was not, when they emerged from the guesthouse. Then they killed the courier’s brother inside the main house, who they say was armed. Then they moved up the stairs:

… three SEALs marched up the stairs. Midway up, they saw bin Laden’s twenty-three-year-old son, Khalid, craning his neck around the corner. He then appeared at the top of the staircase with an AK-47. Khalid, who wore a white T-shirt with an overstretched neckline and had short hair and a clipped beard, fired down at the Americans. (The counterterrorism official claims that Khalid was unarmed, though still a threat worth taking seriously. “You have an adult male, late at night, in the dark, coming down the stairs at you in an Al Qaeda house — your assumption is that you’re encountering a hostile.”) At least two of the SEALs shot back and killed Khalid.

Ok, that’s pretty strange. First, Schmidle asserts that Khalid bin Laden was armed and fired with an AK-47. Then he quotes the counterterrorism official — who could in fact be Brennan — saying that Khalid was unarmed. Why does the New Yorker first run the “Khalid was armed” claim as a fact, and then include the official disclaimer? What’s really going on here, even from the New Yorker’s editorial standpoint?

Here’s another such instance: A dispute over where Osama was when they first saw him:

Three SEALs shuttled past Khalid’s body and blew open another metal cage, which obstructed the staircase leading to the third floor. Bounding up the unlit stairs, they scanned the railed landing. On the top stair, the lead SEAL swivelled right; with his night-vision goggles, he discerned that a tall, rangy man with a fist-length beard was peeking out from behind a bedroom door, ten feet away. The SEAL instantly sensed that it was Crankshaft [codename for Osama]. (The counterterrorism official asserts that the SEAL first saw bin Laden on the landing, and fired but missed.)

What’s the purpose of all this? How good is intelligence work when they can’t reconstruct whether the singular focus of the operation was first spotted peeking out from a doorway, or standing on the landing above them?

And then one of the most interesting passages, about the kill:

A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden’s chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. “There was never any question of detaining or capturing him — it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,” the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.)

Uh-oh. So who is this Special Operations officer? He is directly disputing the administration’s claim on what surely matters greatly — what were President Obama’s intentions here? And did they always plan to just ignore them? That the New Yorker just drops this in with no further analysis or context is, simply put, shocking.

It seems almost as if Panetta, Obama, and the people in the story who most closely approximate actual representatives of the public in a functioning democracy, were basically cut off from observing what went down that day — or from influencing what transpired.

Consider this statement from Panetta, not included in the New Yorker piece:

“Once those teams went into the compound I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes where we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on. And there were some very tense moments as we were waiting for information.

“We had some observation of the approach there, but we did not have direct flow of information as to the actual conduct of the operation itself as they were going through the compound.”

Panetta’s “lost 25 minutes” needs to be seen in the context of a man with civilian roots, notwithstanding two mid-60s years as a Lt. in military intel: Former Congressman, Clinton White House budget chief and Chief of Staff, credentials with civil rights and environment movements — a fellow with real distance from the true spook/military mojo.

Taken together, here’s what we have: President Obama did not know exactly what was going on. He did not decide that bin Laden should be shot. And he did not decide to dump his body in the ocean. The CIA and its Special Ops allies made all the decisions.

Then Brennan, the CIA’s man, put out the version that CIA wanted. (Keep in mind that, as noted earlier, CIA was really running the operation — with Special Ops under its direction).

What we’re looking at, folks, is the reality of democracy in America: A permanent entrenched covert establishment that marches to its own drummer or to drummers unknown. It’s exactly the kind of thing that never gets reported. Too scary. Too real. Better to dismiss this line of inquiry as too “conspiracy theory.”

If that sounds like hyperbole, let me add this rather significant consideration. It is the background of Nicholas Schmidle, the freelancer who wrote the New Yorker piece. It may give us insight into how he landed this extraordinary exclusive on this extraordinarily sensitive matter — information again, significantly, not shared by the New Yorker with its readers:

Schmidle’s father is Marine Lt. General Robert E. “Rooster” Schmidle Jr.  General Schmidle served as Commanding Officer of Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force (Experimental) — that’s essentially Special Operations akin to Navy SEALs. In recent years, he was “assistant deputy commandant for Programs and Resources (Programs)” — where, among other things, he oversaw “irregular warfare.” (See various, including contract specs here on “Special Operations,” and picture caption here) In 2010, he moved into another piece of this, when Obama appointed him deputy commander, U.S. Cyber Command. Cumulatively, this makes the author’s father a very important man in precisely the sort of circles who care how the raid is publicly portrayed — and who would be quite intimate with some of the folks hunkering down with Obama in the Situation Room on the big day.

You can see a photo of Gen. Schmidle on a 2010 panel about “Warring Futures.” Event co-sponsors include Slate magazine and the New America Foundation, both of which, according to Nicholas Schmidle’s website, have also provided Schmidle’s son with an ongoing perch (with Slate giving him a platform for numerous articles from war zones and the foundation employing him as a Fellow.) These parallel relationships grow more disturbing with contemplation.

***

So let’s get back to the question, Who is driving this Ship of State?

First, consider this passage:

Obama returned to the White House at two o’clock, after playing nine holes of golf at Andrews Air Force Base. The Black Hawks departed from Jalalabad thirty minutes later. Just before four o’clock, Panetta announced to the group in the Situation Room that the helicopters were approaching Abbottabad.

To be really useful reporting here, rather than just meaningless “color”, we’d need some context. Was the golf game’s purpose to blow off steam at an especially tense time? Did Obama not think it important enough for him to be constantly present in the hours leading up to the raid? Is this typical of his schedule when huge things are happening?  We desperately need a more realistic sense of what presidents do, how much they’re really in charge, or, instead, figureheads for unnamed individuals who make most of the critical decisions.

Here’s something just as strange: we are told the President took a commanding role in determining key operational tactics, but then didn’t seem interested in important details, after the fact.

Forty-five minutes after the Black Hawks departed, four MH-47 Chinooks launched from the same runway in Jalalabad. Two of them flew to the border, staying on the Afghan side; the other two proceeded into Pakistan. Deploying four Chinooks was a last-minute decision made after President Barack Obama said he wanted to feel assured that the Americans could “fight their way out of Pakistan.”

Now, consider the following climactic New Yorker account of Obama meeting with the squadron commander after it’s all over, with bin Laden dead and the troops home and safe. Schmidle decides to call the commander “James… the names of all the covert operators mentioned in this story have been changed.” The anecdote will feature a canine, one who, in true furry dog story fashion, had already been introduced early in the New Yorker piece, as “Cairo” (it’s not clear whether the dog’s name, too, was changed):

As James talked about the raid, he mentioned Cairo’s role. “There was a dog?” Obama interrupted. James nodded and said that Cairo was in an adjoining room, muzzled, at the request of the Secret Service.

“I want to meet that dog,” Obama said.

“If you want to meet the dog, Mr. President, I advise you to bring treats,” James joked. Obama went over to pet Cairo, but the dog’s muzzle was left on.

Here’s the ending:

Before the President returned to Washington, he posed for photographs with each team member and spoke with many of them, but he left one thing unsaid. He never asked who fired the kill shot, and the SEALs never volunteered to tell him.

Why did the president not want to ask for specifics on the most important parts of the operation — but seemed so interested in a dog that participated? While it is certainly plausible that this happened, we should be wary of one of the oldest p.r. tricks around — get people cooing over an animal, while the real action is elsewhere.

Certainly, Obama’s reaction differs dramatically from that of other previous presidents who always demanded detailed briefings and would have stayed on top of it all throughout — including fellow Democrats JFK, Carter and Clinton. At minimum, it shows a degree of caution or ceremony based upon a desire not to know too much — or an understanding that he may not ask. Does anyone doubt that Bill Clinton would have been on watch 24/7 during this operation, parsing legal, political and operational details throughout, and would have demanded to know who felled America’s most wanted?

Summing up about the reliability of this account, which is now likely to become required reading for every student in America, long into the future:

•It is based on reporting by a man who fails to disclose that he never spoke to the people who conducted the raid, or that his father has a long background himself running such operations (this even suggests the possibility that Nicholas Schmidle’s own father could have been one of those “unnamed sources.”)

•It seems to have depended heavily on trusting second-hand accounts by people with a poor track record for accurate summations, and an incentive to spin.

•The alleged decisions on killing bin Laden and disposing of his body lack credibility.

•The DNA evidence that the SEALs actually got their man is questionable.

•Though certain members of Congress say they have seen photos of the body (or, to be precise, a body), the rest of us have not seen anything.

•Promised photos of the ceremonial dumping of the body at sea have not materialized.

•The eyewitnesses from the house — including the surviving wives — have disappeared without comment.

We weren’t allowed to hear from the raid participants. And on August 6, seventeen Navy SEALs died when their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan. We’re told that fifteen of them came, amazingly, from the same SEAL Team 6 that carried out the Abbottabad raid — but that none of the dead were present for the raid. We do get to hear the stories of those men, and their names.

Of course, if any of those men had been in the Abbottabad raid — or knew anything about it of broad public interest, we’d be none the wiser — because, the  only  ”reliable sources” still available (and featured by the New Yorker) are military and intelligence professionals, coming out of a long tradition of cover-ups and fabrications.

Meanwhile, we have this president, this one who according to the magazine article didn’t ask about the core issues — why this man was killed, who killed him, under whose orders, what would be done with the body.

Well, he may not want answers. But we ought to want them. Otherwise, it’s all just a game.

It is, instead, the very essence of the man and his empire, and their long-term impact on our world and our lives. (For a detailed look at his practices, see for example this, this and this.)

Here are 12 “take-away” points that are being obscured in the daily rush of revelations, and the related specialized coverage (his wife’s wardrobe and demeanor, the effect on his company’s stock price, etc.):

He has transformed world politics for the worse: It was George W. Bush’s first cousin (John Ellis), working as head of Murdoch’s Fox News election night “decision desk,” who, during the Florida voting uncertainties, called the election for Bush and set off a chain reaction from other media. The eight Bush years that followed, and all that came with them, can in this respect be laid at Murdoch’s feet. Once Bush was finally out of power, it was two of Murdoch’s most powerful entities (Fox News Channel and the Wall Street Journal) that provided a regular editorial slot for Bush’s “architect” Karl Rove to attack Bush’s successor. Murdoch’s role on the state and local level has been no less significant — in New York, for example, he has used his pulpit (including the New York Post) to advance the careers of sympathetic politicians (see the mayoral election of Ed Koch, for example) as well as to relentlessly promote local, state and national scandals (Lewinsky, et al.) that wounded or destroyed pols and candidates not in his corner. He has similarly influenced and shaped governments in the U.K., Australia, and elsewhere for decades.

He has ridiculed and raised doubts about global catastrophes, and about science itself, while elevating absurd theories and hyping minor matters. For example, his outlets have played a leading role in dismissing and deriding scientific consensus on climate change, while creating hysteria about false issues like President Obama’s place of birth.

He has undermined liberty: His outlets led the drumbeat for restriction or elimination of certain fundamental rights, including those under the U.S. Fourth Amendment, while at the same time supporting unrestrained wiretapping, the harsh treatment of suspects who may have done nothing wrong, and fueling panic justifying the buildup of the national surveillance state.

He has turned the public against the press. By the generally inferior product produced, with a few exceptions, by the majority of the news outlets he controls and the tawdry methods sponsored by many of them, he has eroded the public’s confidence in media in general, tarnishing its belief even in those outfits whose work deserves to be taken seriously. He has also used his outlets to convince the public that other, more conscientious news organizations are ideologically suspect and biased.

He has simultaneously propagandized for “the law” and compromised it. Murdoch properties are the leading hagiographers of law enforcement and the military — while at the same time routinely assailing the patriotism of those who advocate for civil and privacy rights, who question wars, and so forth. Meanwhile, as shown by the unfolding U.K. drama, Murdoch himself stands accused of compromising the law enforcement establishment — and not just in that country. (See his relationship with former New York police commissioner Kerik, who is now in prison, for example.)

He has undermined essential rules about propriety in the news business, degrading ethical walls put in place through long tradition. He has used his properties to advance his personal interests, and made cross-promotion his trademark.

He has propagandized for many of society’s worst instincts. Whether it involves advancing subtle racism or stoking greed, Murdoch and his minions have been out front. Fox News and the New York Post are best known for this in the U.S., but examples of various magnitudes may be found in almost all of his properties.

He has until now effectively neutralized many would-be critics in journalism. As the news profession shrinks, his control over an increasing percentage of the paying positions makes journalists reticent to risk their jobs — or the prospects of future employment — by speaking out about his practices. The current flurry of revelations are only possible because of the sheer force of cascading events.

He has relentlessly applied a double standard: Long a vilifier of others as communist sympathizers, he has created a pragmatic, but cynical partnership with the Chinese communist party dictators that has benefited him financially without helping (in fact, in some ways hindering) the prospects of democracy and freedom in that country.

He has dumbed down the news business and hence the public. His tabloidization of the world has now come back to haunt him with a made-for-Murdoch-style story of an ogre-like entity hacking the phone of a murdered 13-year-old girl. This kind of story makes it impossible for him to defend himself on more nuanced, big-picture grounds. Nevertheless, where Murdoch and News Corp. are concerned, the broader activities hardly look any better.

He has used his wealth regularly to stave off businesses and individuals that his company has illegally damaged. Multimillion-dollar payoffs have led plaintiffs and would-be plaintiffs to withdraw their lawsuits and agree to silence.

His campaign contributions and the public support of his media organizations have persuaded politicians to override laws against media monopolies. And with each successive step, his growing dominance made the following step in building an empire easier to achieve.

You don’t have to imagine, though, when history provides enough clues. For more than 100 years, American business leaders (usually with the cooperation of local potentates) have funded Christian missionaries to set up universities in foreign countries with valuable resources to exploit. This collaboration has served to create a more friendly environment for establishing a business foothold while simultaneously fulfilling the missionaries’ desire to spread the Word around the globe.

In the Middle East — where the business has primarily been oil — the Rockefellers and others generously funded such institutions as the American University of Beirut, which was established on the bedrock of conservative Christian values more than 100 years ago. It began modestly, with one class of 16 students in 1863. Over time, it became a venerable academic oasis, characterized by values that could be accurately described as cosmopolitan and liberal.

With AUI-S in contemporary Kurdistan, however, it was back to square one, ideologically speaking. Oil — or “The Prize” as it is often called — was once again the business at hand. This time, access to The Prize was given to George W. Bush’s good friend and contributor, the Texan Ray Hunt, whose Kurdish oil concession is potentially worth billions of dollars. And from the beginning, the academic component of this particular foreign foothold has been plagued by problems far worse than the usual disarray that attends any new university venture. That’s because the people setting it up were missionaries of a uniquely postmodern variety.

Mugged by reality — again

As with the occupation itself, the task of building and running the American University of Iraq-Sulaimaniya was given to Bush/Cheney administration loyalists. Generally, they were neoconservative ideologues with a fundamentalist Christian outlook, who brashly dismissed prior experience and scholarship so far as it concerned the culture and conditions on the ground.

The failure to do even the most basic homework was quickly apparent. Right after its opening, the university was caught up in a sex scandal. Officials discovered that they had improperly vetted Owen Cargol, the man chosen to be AUI-S’s first chancellor. Somehow, they had missed news reports that Cargol had resigned his previous post as president of Northern Arizona University only four months into his tenure after being accused of sexual harassment.

A male employee at NAU had filed a suit alleging that Cargol — the married father of two — had grabbed the employee’s genitals. Cargol’s accuser made public the contents of an e-mail in which Cargol had written: “For sure, I am a rub-your-belly, grab-your-balls, give-you-a-hug, slap-your-back, pull-your-dick, squeeze-your-hand, cheek-your-face, and pat-your-thigh kind of guy.” Cargol was let go without any severance pay or benefits. The accuser received a settlement of more than $100,000.

Cargol’s replacement in Iraq was a man named John Agresto, an old friend of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Agresto had been a senior official at the National Endowment for the Humanities in the Reagan administration, alongside Lynne Cheney and Agresto’s personal mentor, William Bennett. His nomination to be archivist of the United States had been blocked by concerns voiced by more than a dozen academic and professional associations that he was inappropriately partisan and lacked qualifications for the position.

Through his connections, Agresto, former president of St. John’s College in New Mexico (on whose board Rumsfeld’s wife served), had originally been appointed as the education advisor for the Coalition Provisional Authority that initially ran the American occupation under Paul Bremer’s command. (He noted proudly that he hadn’t done research about Iraq’s educational system besides a Google search before landing in Baghdad in September 2003 with two suitcases and a feather pillow. “I wanted to come here with as open a mind as I could have,” he told the Washington Post in a profile that appeared prior to his taking the university position. “I’d much rather learn firsthand than have it filtered to me by an author.” )

This was, to say the least, an unusual approach for someone who had been and would again become the head of an academic institution. But though he seemingly did not realize it, Agresto was in fact being influenced by others’ perceptions — albeit perceptions carefully orchestrated by the invading power. “Like everyone else in America, I saw images of people cheering as Saddam Hussein’s statue was pulled down,” he said. “I saw people hitting pictures of him with their shoes. Once you see that you can’t help but say, ‘Okay. This is going to work.’” At the time, Agresto assumed that Iraq “would feel like a newly liberated East European nation, keen to embrace the West and democratic change.”

Once in country, Agresto was immediately confronted with the fact that Iraq wasn’t Eastern Europe but rather a frenetic Middle Eastern shooting gallery. “Visits to the universities he was trying to rebuild and the faculty he wanted to invigorate were more and more dangerous, and infrequent,” wrote Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran. “His Iraq staff was threatened by insurgents … his plans to repair hundreds of campus buildings were scuttled by the Bush administration’s decision to shift reconstruction efforts and by the failure to raise money from other sources …”

Puffing on a pipe by a swimming pool in the Green Zone, safely away from the bullets and bombs outside, a defeated Agresto told his interviewer, “I’m a neoconservative who’s been mugged by reality.” It was a reference, of course, to the old neocon saw about conservatives being former liberals who finally had faced the cold hard facts. But in his case, it seems to have meant forsaking notions about democracy in favor of a more colonial approach. (Agresto did not respond to an e-mail from WhoWhatWhy seeking an interview.)

Agresto left Iraq after his occupation stint, but was reinvited to the scene of his “mugging” in order to replace Cargol as AUI-S chancellor. This time, it was no more Mr. Nice Guy. Ditto with the man who followed him into the chancellorship when he became provost. This was Joshua Mitchell, a Georgetown University professor of political theory. From the time Mitchell began pursuing his Ph.D. in the late 1980s at that neoconservative temple the University of Chicago, he’d drawn considerable funding from the right-wing Bradley and Olin foundations, half of the conservative movement quartet dubbed the “Four Sisters.” Mitchell had also gotten money from Lewis E. Lehrman, a well-known financier of right-wing political and academic projects, who endowed a chair for him at the Fund for American Studies, an ideologically conservative educational institute.

If Agresto had become a neo-colonialist by the time he returned to Iraq, Mitchell in some ways was the classic colonial university official with the Bible in his pocket. In addition to teaching political theory at Georgetown, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. Shortly before he signed on with AUI-S, he delivered a speech at a religious conference in Colorado Springs in which he observed that Americans were fundamentally Calvinists “with purity and stain, with salvation and damnation, and with the inner perspicuity that was needed to tell the difference.”

Former AUI-S faculty member Mark Grueter recalls Mitchell peppering his in-class exchanges with biblical quotations, although in an interview with WhoWhatWhy, Mitchell emphatically disputed this. “I am involved in mainline discussions in political science and with respect to what I’m doing here, I do no proselytizing. It does not affect my work. I’m a little surprised you’re raising this and I would hope this is not something that becomes a central point in your story.” [Grueter, internal correspondence shows, was fired over his criticism of the university’s administration -- but points out that just a few weeks before his termination, he had been offered a two-year contract extension and a raise based on his teaching performance.] 

To be sure, the stated mission of the American University of Iraq is secular — and lofty. Its goal is to “promote the development and prosperity of Iraq through the careful study of modern commerce, economics, business and public administration, and to lead the transformation of Iraq into a free and democratic society, through an understanding of the ideals of liberty and democracy.”

The devil, of course, is in the details. One student we spoke with expressed resentment at being force-fed a kind of colonialist pap via the principal textbook in his American history survey class. “This book talks about Indians not very friendly[sic], like a bad people.” Seeking to recall the title and author, he went and pulled the book off his shelf, and read aloud: “The Last Best Hope,” by William J. Bennett — John Agresto’s mentor and perhaps the leading theorist of the neoconservative cultural movement that seeks to defend traditional interpretations of the American adventure. Bennett himself characterized his book as an attempt to make Americans feel good about their history.

The student, a bright Kurd with moderate mastery of spoken English, noted: “When William J. Bennett talks about the Indians he talks about them that they were hostile, they didn’t know anything, and all they learned how to live and how to behave was from the Europeans. This book is biased [toward] the Americans but that’s what we study.”

The student says that he was so troubled by the characterizations in the book that he turned to the Internet for other material. He said that many of his classmates, less motivated, did not read the book or seek out other material, but simply took notes on what the teacher — a Bennett sympathizer — said and then repeated it back for exams.

Someone seems to have considered this kind of work a high priority, for AUI-S got its academic accreditation in what is surely one of the fastest times on record. It usually takes years for a college to get up and running, and to graduate enough students to meet the criteria set by reputable accreditation institutions. For example, although the American University of Beirut has been registered and recognized by the New York State Education Department since 1863, it only received its accreditation in June 2004 — following a lengthy process and more than a century after it had been established.

By comparison, according to its own website, the American University of Iraq received a five-year unconditional accreditation in June 2010, less than three years after opening its doors. Under even ideal circumstances, this would have been unusually fast. But AUI-S does not enjoy ideal circumstances. First of all, the university is still under construction. Eventually, administrators hope to enroll 5,000 students. For now, largely on account of interminable construction delays, the student population has hovered around 650-750.

Meanwhile, the faculty, numbering around 40 in the past year, are overwhelmingly from the West; the vast majority do not speak Arabic. The students are all Iraqis, with the great majority being non-Arab Kurds, a mix of the poor and the more privileged. Generally, they arrive on campus with an English comprehension so low that few could take college-level courses in English. The majority must therefore go through an English preparatory program, which can last several years. This means that it takes longer for the students to pass enough required courses to earn their degrees, which is another reason why the university’s rapid accreditation seems odd.

The answer to the mystery seems to bear the name of Cheney. The body that gave AUI-S its seal of approval is the American Academy for Liberal Education, co-founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of the former vice president, during her tenure as humanities czar during George W. Bush’s father’s administration. The AALE specializes in accrediting conservative and religious colleges, and has received funding from the Olin Foundation, a leading supporter of the right-wing effort to reshape American educational and cultural institutions. That’s the same Olin Foundation that funded chancellor Joshua Mitchell’s work before he came to AUI-S. 

AALE’s own credibility has been questioned before, even during the Bush-Cheney presidency. According to a 2008 ruling by Margaret Spelling, George W. Bush’s secretary of education, AALE had been “cited consistently since 2001 for either not having clear standards with respect to measuring student outcomes or not collecting and reviewing data on how institutions it accredits measure student outcomes.”

“Evil, pure and simple”

As with the invasion itself, a gap seems to have existed between the lofty, shining rhetoric and a far more tawdry reality. In a July 2008 article for the conservative magazine National Review, Agresto compared Americans working in Iraq to Asahel Grant, the early 19th century Christian missionary and doctor who lived and died in Iraqi Kurdistan. “Like Asahel Grant,” Agresto claimed, “none of them [people working in Iraq] is here for money or oil or politics or honor.” John Dolan, a former AUI-S professor of English composition and literature, begs to differ. “We went to Iraq to make money,” he says about his wife and himself, “and once we got to know our colleagues at AUI-S, we found that nearly all the faculty was there for the same reason … to make money.” Dolan describes one particularly incompetent history teacher who, after having received his first monthly paycheck, loudly announced, “Here I am walking along with $15,000 cash in my pocket!”

Other professors say they took jobs there thinking they’d be teaching at a well-run institution, only to find themselves pressured to push unprepared students into undergraduate programs by administrators worried about the university’s credibility. Some faculty and students claim to be afraid to speak over the phone, even off the record. We heard of alleged attempts to prevent former staffers from leaving Iraq, and several said they feared that if they talked they would not receive their salaries for their final months of work.

A website created by a self-described whistle-blower and AUI-S employee inviting members of the AUI-S community to anonymously post their complaints reflects anger on all sides. “The school is being run by people with no experience running a successful school,” writes one person on the site AUI-S Watch. “We raised awareness of discrimination of Iraqi employees,” writes another. “Yes, we have embarked on a campaign to criticize administrative staff with the aim to expose what we think are questionable management practices. Yes, we have attacked the complete lack of transparency at AUI-S and injustice it harbors.”

Agresto responded to the blog in a letter to AUI-S staff in which he described the reactions to AUI-S Watch that he had received from faculty members:

“One said he felt sick when he read it. Another called it ‘twisted’ and said ‘It’s evil, pure and simple.’ Another wrote to Lara, Josh, and me to repeat the simple truth – ‘the cowardly writer of the blog does not represent our views, nor does this person represent the vast majority of the faculty.’ “

The hostility between the parties was palpable. Meanwhile, former AUI-S professor Dolan has provided a more detailed picture in an Alternet piece titled “I Was a Professor at the Horribly Corrupt American University of Iraq … Until the Neocons Fired Me.” (Dolan was fired in the summer of 2010 — he says Agresto had discovered a satirical article Dolan had written years earlier, critical of neoconservative figures in American politics, many of whom are personal friends of Agresto.)

Dolan portrays an atmosphere of venality, misogyny, anti-Semitism and incompetence, with John Agresto and Joshua Mitchell at the center. He describes Mitchell running around with wads of “taxpayer cash” to pay expenses, including $5,000 each to incoming U.S. teachers “to help [us] settle in.” Dolan writes about the faculty in withering terms:

“There was a clear, simple formula for success at AUI-S: be a Southern white male Republican with a talent for flattery, an undistinguished academic record and very little experience in university-level teaching. Some of the faculty were so dismally unqualified and shameless that even our students … saw through them.”

Dolan’s charges become more serious when he describes Dean of Student Affairs Denise Natali’s response to an ESL teacher being raped. “I see women walking around here in sleeveless t-shirts! Tank tops! What do you expect?” Natali herself received a death threat after expelling several students for missing too many classes. (Attempts to interview Natali, who left AUI-S around the end of 2010, were not successful.) Dolan also describes a male fundamentalist Christian professor calling a female colleague a “fucking whore” and AUI-S personnel director Lara Dizeyee telling new faculty members (presumably as a practical matter in a Muslim country), “If you’re Jewish — keep it to yourself.” Dizeyee, who has also departed AUI-S, could not be reached for comment.

Meanwhile, AUI-S’s website keeps up appearances. Press on the “In the News” prompt and one finds a Commentary magazine article written by neoconservative Abe Greenwald. In “An Extraordinary American Achievement,” Greenwald enthuses about visiting the American University of Iraq with fellow neocon and ex-Middle East CIA specialist Reuel Gerecht. “It would be nice if the ‘books not bombs’ crowd took notice of the educational miracle birthed by Americans in the heart of the Muslim world,” he writes. “Everyone should visit the university’s website and look around. What you’ll find is as well suited to the term ‘shock and awe’ as any bombing campaign, and even more determinative.”

What’s oil this about?

Certain Kurds share that zeal about the university. They’re a particularly privileged group, who pushed heavily for the invasion in the first place and have done very well for themselves in the years since. They have a stake in a long-term U.S. presence in Kurdistan — as a protective force both against their Sunni and Shiite fellow Iraqis to the South, and against the Iranians just next door. They also need a viable oil industry and the kind of workforce a university like AUI-S can potentially provide.

Kanan Makiya, a leading neocon and high-profile advocate of the 2003 invasion who sits on the AUI-S board, told WhoWhatWhy that the idea for the university began with Barham Salih, prime minister of the Kurdistan region, which is semi-autonomous from Baghdad. Salih, who is chairman of the AUI-S board of trustees, ran the Kurdish lobbying effort in Washington since shortly after the first Gulf War, and was, like Makiya, a key figure in pushing for the ouster of Saddam.

The Kurds associated with AUI-S seem to have huge amounts of money at their disposal. Salih raised $55 million for the university in 2009, purportedly through private sources, who have not been named. And Salih has promised an additional $100 million, mainly to fund the construction of the new campus. Jalal Talabani, president of Iraq, another AUI-S board member, reportedly personally donated $65 million (where that money came from is uncertain).

In this part of the world, when such sums are involved, oil is almost always in the picture. The same year AUI-S was founded, the Kurdistan regional government signed a $700 million contract dubbed “Kurdistan Gas City,” with oil and gas affiliates Dana Gas and Crescent Petroleum, both based in the United Arab Emirates. The oil contract the companies signed with Dr. Salih — an oil engineer who became fabulously wealthy — is, according to Crescent’s website, “the largest private-sector investment currently being undertaken in Iraq.”

In 2008, Crescent Petroleum paid for American University of Iraq representatives to attend the “GetEnergy” summit in London, whose sponsors include the British firm BP. As GetEnergy says in promotional materials:

We don’t provide education or training ourselves, but we help find the best fit between organizations that do (universities and training providers), and companies looking for education and/or training programmes in the oil and gas industry.

Afterward, former AUI-S chancellor Owen Cargol talked about how he looked forward to working closely with Crescent to use the university as a research center for the oil and gas industry. After the event, the AUI-S chancellor noted:

We are grateful for the support of Crescent Petroleum. AUI-S will use this opportunity to forge fruitful joint institutional partnerships with universities from around the world and the various energy companies to make AUI-S a regional center of excellence in all research aspects of the oil and gas industry in Iraq and beyond.

In the fall of 2009, the university launched an entity it dubbed the Twin Rivers Institute. TRI is described as an “advanced studies center for science and technology which will provide modern solutions to the problems facing industries, government agencies, and others working in the region.” With a division dedicated to Remote Sensing, a process used to detect oil, the Twin Rivers Institute embodies AUI-S’s promise to become a center of excellence in research for the petroleum industry. (The university itself offers the following degrees: a master’s in business administration and bachelor’s in international relations; information systems and technology; and environmental science and engineering.)

Settling in

Whether because of the turmoil, or despite it (they say the latter), both Mitchell and Agresto resigned last year and have returned to the United States. But the institution and the objectives behind it continue. Evidence that AUI-S may be part of a larger geopolitical vision comes in the form of yet another American institution of higher learning, this one the American University of Afghanistan.

In 2005, CBS News covered Laura Bush making a “secret” trip to Afghanistan to announce a $40 million USAID-funded grant to support university-level education and combat illiteracy. Since then, the American University of Afghanistan has opened its doors under the leadership of Dr. C. Michael Smith. Previously, Smith was a founder and president of another little-known entity, the American University of Nigeria, which has the added credibility of such respected board members as South Africa’s Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu. So far, the American University of Afghanistan [AUAF] is expanding with no hint of the chaos and scandal that have shaken AUI-S. One intriguing note is one of the entities listed as partnering with AUAF: Goldman Sachs.

It’s hard to know where all this is going, or the long-term implications. But at least where Iraq is concerned, Thomas Friedman’s “Island of Decency” is no certainty. Were we seeing a proclivity to send the most inspiring educational figures — and perhaps to a place not packed with oil — we might have reason to be more hopeful.

Former AUI-S faculty member Mark Grueter, a doctoral candidate in history, provided research and reporting assistance.