LETTERS

LETTERS Great Gains It is not surprising that six people had to collaborate, five as "researchers," to produce so misleading, errorfilled, and ignorant an article as Jonathan Rowe's in your...

...It cannot have been easy...
...Not all Navy and Marine Corps personnel are on sea duty at any given time, but essentially all do rotate between sea and shore regularly throughout their service time...
...A. McLEAN Scotts Valley, California Or They Could Be at the Dentist Don't you think it's a little simplistic to equate Friday absences from work with some kind of wrongdoing ("Tilting at Windmills',' October...
...The day previous to reading your inspired article I had read an article on Chile by Mr...
...I fear that here you have generalized from Army experience to the military overall without considering the uniqueness of Navy and Marine Corps in this area...
...I hope the Philippines is not another...
...Your October statement was: "Most of us simply don't do work that is physically demanding or dangerous...
...To be met with your article the following day was considerable relief...
...Iran is a perfect example of how the current policy can fail us...
...Take the Philippines, where the U.S...
...The CIA's filtering process has long been a bone of contention between NSA and CIA since NSA's information is "hard"—signals intelligence—while CIA's information is "sofe= human intelligence...
...I would guess that for many people (including me), this is a way of using my vacation that I otherwise would have trouble taking (and sometimes end up losing...
...confronts a friendly country in the throes of a crisis both economic and political...
...That's right, only two people to keep track of intelligence happenings in the places most likely to give us foreign policy and military problems...
...The only "choice" that Chileans have is to accept Pinochet's repressive administration or face torture, death, or exile...
...Another explanation might be that many people use up vacation days this way, particularly in the summer...
...Haldemans in the Reagan White House and were in the Carter White House...
...I'm sure there are H.R...
...Hard intelligence is more credible than is soft intelligence...
...A fair assessment would acknowledge that this occupation is physically more demanding and more dangerous than what average citizens are exposed to...
...In the last five years, democracy has made extraordinary gains in Latin America, where country after country has become or is about to become free: Argentina, Honduras, El Salvador, Uruguay, and Grenada are examples...
...NSA seems to have won on this point since SIGINT reports now go directly to "consumers" without first going through the CIA...
...This all managed to remain hidden from the "researchers ." Mr...
...It is a comfort to know that apathy and pussyfooting do not haunt the editorial corners of The Washington Monthly...
...Good compensation is just...
...In fact, there is more human rights activity now than ever before, while recent studies have noted the increasing failure of human rights policy with each passing year of the Carter administration...
...Underlings eventually get the message...
...In the case of Thresher, a number of personnel from Portsmouth Naval Shipyard were also killed...
...The difference here between Navy/Marine Corps and Army/Air Force is that the sea services place forces in forward areas through deployment of autonomous, self-contained units which include support personnel, whereas the land services place combat units forward but keep support personnel home, with individuals fitting into career categories as you allude to...
...In my view, our decision-makers do get most of the information they need to make good decisions...
...The "researchers" must have missed that one...
...Rowe and his "researchers ." Every year, the State Department releases a 1,500-page report on human rights in every country in the world, and that report has been hailed by Congress, the press, and human rights groups...
...name withheld) Duped Again Your shot at the upper-class benefactors of SimpsonMazzoli ["Tilting at Windmills:' September] hits the family farmer right between the eyes...
...RUTH A. HINDMAN Torrance, California [Jonathan Rowe's] article in the October issue was outstanding...
...The problem seems to be not so much the availability of information as what advisers and decision-makers do with it...
...Whether we actually get the information we need from our intelligence agencies and the State Department is another question...
...I was surprised, when I went to work at NSA, that in all things we analysts were to be cautious and call a spade a spade...
...The work is physically demanding (just standing upright in a seaway is physically demanding) and risky...
...The more accurate statement of the Navy/Marine Corps situation is that all share the risks and the physical hardships (as well as family separation...
...The biggest problem I noticed while at NSA was the concentration of effort on the Soviet Union and China to the exclusion of the rest of the world...
...To someone like me who has more than a passing interest in foreign policy it was like a breath of fresh air after being smothered by the Reagan administration...
...While the Marines were in Lebanon and during the Grenada invasion, I saw how this lack of coverage could affect the quality of information going to decision-makers...
...Likewise, the result of this policy in the military is similar to that in the foreign service: incompetence, lackadaisical/bureaucratic attitudes, a feeling that "it doesn't matter what I do since I'll be gone soon ." In short, we get careerism at the expense of professionalism...
...human rights policy...
...Those in charge of our intelligence efforts need to recognize that while it's important to keep track of what the Russians and Chinese are doing, it's the third world and terrorism all over that are going to present us with our biggest challenges...
...Not all of us can always take our vacations in week-long batches whenever we want...
...Serious evaluations of Reagan administration achievements and failures, no matter how critical, advance U.S...
...Flip attacks filled with mistakes don't...
...It has always disgusted me that so few of our foreign service officers know the language(s) and the history and cultures of their host countries...
...LETTERS Great Gains It is not surprising that six people had to collaborate, five as "researchers," to produce so misleading, errorfilled, and ignorant an article as Jonathan Rowe's in your October issue ["Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Foreign Policy...
...ELLIOTT ABRAMS Washington, D.C...
...How to get from here to full democracy is the challenge all Filipinos, and their friends in the U.S., face, and there are no magic wands to wave...
...Compare this to the dozens of people who handle the Soviet bloc and China...
...Human rights are still alive and well in the United States in spite of the Oval Office...
...When at sea, they share danger pretty much equally...
...I thought neoliberals were supposed to realize that life, and foreign policy, weren't that simple...
...You've played right into the hands of the agri-industry moguls...
...NSA's 24-hour operations center has only two desks that act as clearing houses for intelligence from this part of the world...
...You have restored my dying faith in the First Amendment as a constitutional shield that protects truthful but controversial speech as well as the all-too-often undisputed lie...
...It is a crisis the president discussed recently with perhaps the Philippines' bestknown critic of the government, Cardinal Jaime Sin—a fact that also escaped the "researchers ." United States policy is not to support or oppose President Marcos...
...On the other hand, the CIA tries to find communist and, especially, Soviet involvement in events that even considerable analysis shows to be innocent...
...Rowe and his crew want cut off, and to press hard for a return to democratic institutions and for basic economic reform...
...You obviously need a way-of-life farmer on your editorial staff...
...Or, we might prefer not to use it tlp all at once...
...And to someone like me who has worked for the National Security Agency, the section "Using Our Eyes and Ears" was particularly interesting...
...JOHN L. BYRON Arlington, Virginia...
...In one case a CIA analyst was visiting us to see what information we had about Soviet involvement in a particular area...
...Somehow this escapes the attention of Mr...
...The entire crews of Thresher and Scorpion were lost, including the cooks and clerks and supply officers...
...Rowe's article is, sadly, not serious...
...Consider some examples to illustrate my point: The Marines killed in Beirut were members of a headquarters company largely composed of support personnel, the sort you say do not live dangerously...
...The United States has spoken out again and again against human rights violations in Chile, South Africa, Paraguay, and El Salvador, as well as Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, and Iran...
...The author is assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs...
...I was told after he left that such incidents were not uncommon—even under previous administrations...
...Diehl in The Washington Post weekly edition...
...The boss only wants to see certain information and, since they want to keep their jobs, they are more than willing to oblige...
...Having just completed a research project on torture in Chile, I was outraged by this misrepresentation...
...JUD LAWRIE Chicago, Illinois Supports Support One of the windmills you regularly go full-tilt at is the military retirement system...
...We were not to draw conclusions based on limited evidence and when we saw something new or different we were to report what we saw...
...Their myopia (as you pointed out) makes them discount information that doesn't confirm their preconceptions...
...Diehl's article leads the reader to believe that General Pinochet is a charismatic people's choice...
...Your solution is the right one: presidents who demand to hear the bad news with the good...
...Our armed forces follow a similar misguided policy by transferring people (especially officers) every two or three years regardless of how much they know about their jobs at the end of one tour or how little they know about their new jobs at the beginning of their next tour...
...it is to support the Philippines in this moment of crisis, especially with economic aid that Mr...
...We can't expect to be able to act before the fact unless we have intelligence assets in place and know what's happening in the non-Soviet/Chinese world...
...When we told him we'd not seen any indication of Soviet involvement over many months, he pressed us to look again saying, "We know it's there," even though the evidence indicated otherwise...
...You rightly point out that a lot of this is due to the State Department's attempt to prepare all FSOs to be secretary of state...
...The CIA, in theory, is able to decide what higherups see and don't see because it is our Central Intelligence Agency: the agency to which all raw intelligence from the other agencies, including NSA, is supposed to go for analysis and packaging as what's called "finished intelligence...
...Rowe's article is silly, for he wants readers to believe it's all easy and uncomplicated, just a matter of clapping our hands and producing democracy...
...But that doesn't mean other filters don't exist to shelter the ultimate consumers—the secretary of state, national security adviser, president—from the truth...

Vol. 16 • December 1984 • No. 11


 
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