My search for a high-paying job with bonuses and stock options is not a magnificent success story. Last year, I thought I had the New York Mets’ manager’s job sewn up, but they gave it to Willie Randolph largely because he is younger and he is a Brooklyn native. When the New York Knickerbockers demoted Herb Williams, I thought I had that job sewn up as well. Instead, the Knicks gave the job to Hubie Brown and gave him a long-term contract at $10 million per season. I would have been a much cheaper investment. When Bush finally got the nerve to fire his Treasury Secretary, I thought that job was going to be mine as well. Instead, it went to the Chairman of the Goldman Sachs Company who said that he took a $38 million cut in annual salary to accept the job. I would have come much cheaper in that job as well.
The incomes of people in top jobs are to my mind clearly astounding. For example, the head man at Home Depot made $40 million last year while his sales fell 12% and the stock price declined almost the same amount. Two executives from the Chase Bank who live here in New Jersey were paid $35 million each. I have an account with Chase Bank but my account seldom reaches anything like $35 million. A few years ago a company was formed here called Celgene, which offered a cancer drug. I initially invested in Celgene and sold it when it showed no promise. Things have turned around at Celgene and its two top executives each were paid nearly $33 million last year. So these are the kinds of jobs I have been searching for.
Two years ago when George Bush was mounting his campaign to invade Iraq, his CIA director, George Tenet, assured him that there were weapons of mass destruction and that invading Iraq was a “slam dunk.” It is fairly clear now that we have had three years since Bush announced “mission accomplished”, that invading Iraq was no slam dunk and that the weapons of mass destruction were certainly no slam dunk either. So Mr. Bush fired Mr. Tenet and gave him the Medal of Honor. With that, the Duke of Crawford summoned a chairman from one of the House committees, named Porter Goss, and ordained him as the new Director of the CIA. When Goss took over, he was told by the President that the Chief Executive was greatly annoyed by the leaks going to the newspapers, which he claimed came from the CIA. He told Goss to fix that. Goss fired a string of experienced executives and in so doing, gutted the agency. Furthermore, Mr. Goss wrote a letter to all of the CIA employees instructing them that their views should conform with administration policies. According to my advisors from the deep forests of the Ozarks, this is bass ackwards. Intelligence comes first, not last. And it should never conform to anybody’s preconceived notions¹.
Eighteen months after Mr. Goss was appointed Director of the CIA, the king of the universe fired him as well. There was a meeting at the White House in which the king of the universe and the great decider praised Mr. Goss and showed him the door. At that point, the Duke of Crawford introduced Michael Hayden, a four-star general from the Air Force. It is fairly obvious that General Hayden was the choice of the President all along and he was simply waiting for an opportunity to fire Goss and put Hayden in that job.
General Hayden comes with certain baggage in that he is the author of the snooping program which listens to your telephone calls. Initially it was claimed that only calls from this country to foreign ports would be listened in on when they involved a call between two Al Qaeda representatives. Presumably when Osama Bin Laden wants to talk to one of his representatives in the United States, he places a person-to-person call which makes it much easier for our snoops to locate the call. The New York Times reporter James Risen, discovered General Hayden’s plan to snoop on Americans talking on the telephone. This set off a campaign by the Bush administration to suppress and to deny the rights of the free press that we have enjoyed for the two hundred and eighteen years of our existence. Then the newspaper USA Today disclosed that not only international calls were being monitored but that calls within the United States were also subject to monitoring. The point here is that your freedom to make telephone calls and e-mails is going to be altered by the fact that your government is listening to them and secondly by the thought that when those practices are disclosed, the administration sets out to destroy whatever it can of the discloser.
General Hayden has another problem in that Dana Priest of The Washington Post has disclosed that the CIA is running a series of prisons outside the United States where high-level prisoners are confined and are presumably subject to the laws of the country where they are held, which often permits torture. The administration has responded to the story about the prisons run by the CIA with a determination to cut down The Washington Post. I would suspect that if James Risen or Dana Priest made an illegal bet with a local bookmaker, the administration would know all about it. As a matter of fact, Dana Priest won the Pulitzer Prize this year for her stories on the CIA run prisons.
What the citizens of this country are being asked to do is to give up their right to freely express their views on the telephone in the name of national security. Secondly they are being asked to give up their right to a free press, again on the basis of national security. Many years back, Benjamin Franklin had an apt thought about liberty and security. Franklin said, “Those who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security.” The advice from this old geezer about liberty and security tracks totally with Ben Franklin.
To use an ancient expression, I thought I had a lock on the CIA job. After all, I spent more than three years studying the ways of warfare in the Air Force during World War II. Secondly, during the 1960s I was an AT&T lobbyist, again involved with the American government. I suppose those credentials were not as exciting as the four-star general who appeared before the Senate committee for his confirmation. But on the other hand, I would say that my credentials are impressive as well. There aren’t many of us World War II buck sergeants still around and looking for work.
Speaking of AT&T and General Hayden’s snooping program, it is quite clear that AT&T, my old employer, has contributed mightily to the snooping program. On no occasion has AT&T denied responsibility for collecting and handing over its data to the Federal Government. If the United States government can make heads or tails out of all of the phone calls and e-mails in this country, I commend them. There are literally billions of calls. What they are going to do with them is a mystery to those of us who worked in the telecommunications industry.
But now we go one step beyond the snooping with the administration’s desire to wipe out all opposition from the American press. Again, I would assume that every reporter in Washington and any other sensitive location would have their phones wired so that government people can listen to what they have to say in an attempt to locate who their sources may be. When the administration and General Hayden attack the American press, they should bear in mind the words of Samuel Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, who said, “It is not a good idea to pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel.” In this case I hold not only with Ben Franklin but with Mark Twain as well.
While we are on the subject of freedom and the press, what comes to mind is a significant comment by the Reverend Martin Niemöller, a German Lutheran pastor. During the First World War, Martin Niemöller was the captain of a submarine, also known as U-boats, which sank all kinds of Allied shipping. Following the war, Niemöller became a pastor. In the 1930s, he broke with Adolph Hitler and was eventually imprisoned by Hitler. According to his biographers, Niemöller was sentenced to be executed two days after Germany surrendered. Of course the execution did not take place and Niemöller was released. There’s a quote by Martin Niemöller that ought to fit here when we are talking about liberty and security. In one of his works, the Reverend Niemöller had this to say:

“First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.”

It is fairly clear that the Reverend Martin Niemöller was a brave man and almost paid for it with his life. It is also clear that unless someone speaks up, the forces of oppression will destroy us all. It is my recommendation that General Hayden and his boss and the ultimate boss of all the world, Mr. Bush, should read the remarks of Martin Niemöller.
The burden of this essay has been to offer my thoughts to General Hayden who got the CIA job that I had in mind. Now that we have offered my geezer views to General Hayden, I thought it would be worthwhile to offer a thought or two to the Duke of Crawford about his war with Iraq. When Bush’s father was president, he hired a professional named Brent Scowcroft as his National Security Advisor. Scowcroft knew all the generals and he knew all about military options and hardware. He was a military expert and thus was qualified to serve as the National Security Advisor. When the current president assumed his post, he chose an academic from StanfordUniversity – I believe her job was provost – to be his National Security Advisor. Condoleezza Rice is her name and she had absolutely no qualifications as a National Security Advisor. Her four years in that job showed the paucity of her experience. Nonetheless Mr. Bush promoted her to be the Secretary of State, to succeed a fully-qualified man named Colin Powell.
In 1991 Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the senior Bush, together with Scowcroft, gathered a coalition consisting largely of Arab countries to have Hussein thrown out of Kuwait. That was accomplished and much of Hussein’s army was destroyed in the battles in Kuwait. There was an argument at the end of the so-called Gulf War in 1991-2 that the coalition forces should have gone all the way into Baghdad. Leaning upon Scowcroft’s advice, the elder Bush declined to go to Baghdad and attempt to subdue the Iraqi nation. It was the elder Bush’s thought that we had gone there to liberate Kuwait, and that had been done. To march into Baghdad would have involved a much different set of circumstances. It would have alienated the Arab world as well as those of us in the West who do not share the Arab viewpoint.
Following the war, Bush and Scowcroft wrote a book in which these sentences are significant. They wrote that they did not advance to Baghdad to force Saddam Hussein from power because to do so would have involved “incalculable human and political costs… Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different – and perhaps barren – outcome.”²
When the current Duke of Crawford was asked about why he invaded Iraq and conquered Baghdad against his father’s advice, Bush replied that he sought his advice from “a higher father.” Presumably, Bush was referring to God.
It has been my view that people who are in communication with the Almighty are debatable companions. When a man refers to the thought that he gets his information from on high, there is no amount of earthly logic that will move him. George W. Bush has made much of the religious component of his experience and he has contended that it was God who encouraged him to run for the presidency. Please put me down as a doubter. I am reasonably certain that any God of any kind would not permit the slaughter of nearly 2,500 Americans and perhaps 100,000 Iraqis in a war without justification and without end. Such a God would not have permitted George W. to commit the excesses and the torture at Abu Ghraib Prison. Such an overseer of man’s destinies would not have permitted Mr. Bush to keep those prisoners at Quantanomo for as much as four years without ever knowing the charges against them. My advice to the Duke of Crawford is that he should listen to his earthly father a lot more often than to his heavenly father, whoever that might be.
Well, there you have it. It now appears that my search for a high-paying job will be one as a counselor giving advice to high-level authorities. I am not sure how much people who offer advice are paid or even whether they are entitled to bonuses. I suspect that my career as an advisor probably will pay a little less than the $40 million made by the head man at Home Depot. But if I were offered something less than that, say something on the order of $35 million, I would consider that a pretty fair salary for the advice that I have to offer. On top of that, a publication such as the Reader’s Digest could compose a story about how a former buck sergeant finally began to succeed in this world. As everyone knows, buck sergeants are the salt of the earth. My advice to General Hayden and to George W. will probably be rejected. But I suggest that they ignore it at their own peril.
E. E. CARR
June 6, 2006
1. Wouldn’t it just be more convenient for everyone if reality would just stick to the script sometimes?
2. I really like the choice of the word “barren” here. The idea that “yes, we could do this, but it wouldn’t really accomplish anything aside from spending a lot of money and lives” is one that truly should have been taken to heart earlier.
This essay was a pretty on-point takedown of all the wonderful parts of the PATRIOT act which served to lay the groundwork for all today’s NSA, which endeavors to monitor all human communication. I’ve always wondered, if the NSA is storing all this data somewhere, it’s a shame that I can’t really see what types of stats they have on me. I mean, aside from “conversations about things that could be terrorist activity,” what else are they tracking? At this point, it seems naive to think that they’re going to stop collecting all our data, so now I’d just like to at least see some interesting (that is, unrelated to terrorism) applications of that information. Alas.