March 8, 2006
Elite Troops Get Expanded Role on Intelligence
By THOM SHANKER and SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, March 7 — The military is placing small teams of Special Operations troops in a growing number of American embassies to gather intelligence on terrorists in unstable parts of the world and to prepare for potential missions to disrupt, capture or kill them.

Senior Pentagon officials and military officers say the effort is part of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's two-year drive to give the military a more active intelligence role in the campaign against terrorism. But it has drawn opposition from traditional intelligence agencies like the C.I.A., where some officials have viewed it as a provocative expansion into what has been their turf.

Officials said small groups of Special Operations personnel, sometimes just one or two at a time, have been sent to more than a dozen embassies in Africa, Southeast Asia and South America. These are regions where terrorists are thought to be operating, planning attacks, raising money or seeking safe haven.

Their assignment is to gather information to assist in planning counterterrorism missions, and to help local militaries conduct counterterrorism missions of their own, officials said.

The new mission could become a major responsibility for the military's fast-growing Special Operations Command, which was authorized by President Bush in March 2004 to take the lead in military operations against terrorists. Its new task could give the command considerable clout in organizing the nation's overall intelligence efforts.

The Special Operations command reports to Mr. Rumsfeld, and falls outside the orbit controlled by John D. Negroponte, the newly established director of national intelligence, who oversees all the nation's intelligence agencies. An episode that took place early in the effort underscored the danger and sensitivity of the work, even for soldiers trained for secret combat missions.

In Paraguay a year and a half ago, members of one of the first of these "Military Liaison Elements" to be deployed were pulled out of the country after killing a robber armed with a pistol and a club who attacked them as they stepped out of a taxi, officials said. Though the shooting had nothing to do with their mission, the episode embarrassed senior embassy officials, who had not been told the team was operating in the country.

One official who was briefed on the events, but was not authorized to discuss them, said the soldiers were not operating out of the embassy, but out of a hotel.

Now, officials at the Special Operations Command say, no teams may arrive without the approval of the local ambassador, and the soldiers are based in embassies and are trained to avoid high-profile missteps.

Under guidelines established by Mr. Negroponte, the C.I.A. station chief assigned to most American embassies coordinates American intelligence in those countries.

Most embassies also include defense attachés, military personnel who work with foreign armed forces and report to the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency. But the new special operations personnel have a more direct military role: to satisfy the military's new counterterrorism responsibilities, officials said.

Special Operations forces include the Army Green Berets and Rangers, the Navy Seals, the Marines and special Air Force crews that carry out the most specialized or secret military missions. Their skills range from quick strikes to long-range reconnaissance in hostile territory, military training and medical care.

The creation of the Military Liaison Elements, and the broader tug-of-war over the Special Operations Command's new role, appear to have exacerbated the disorganization, even distrust, that critics in Congress and the academic world have said permeates the government's counterterrorism efforts.

Officials involved in the debate say the situation may require President Bush and his senior national security and defense advisers to step in as referees, setting boundaries and clarifying the orders of the military and other intelligence agencies.

Many current and former C.I.A. officials view the plans by the Special Operations Command, or Socom, as overreaching.

"The Department of Defense is very eager to step up its involvement in counterterrorism activities, and it has set its sights on traditional C.I.A. operational responsibilities and authorities," said John O. Brennan, a 25-year C.I.A. officer who headed the National Counterterrorism Center before retiring last year. "Quite unfortunately, the C.I.A.'s important lead role in many of these areas is being steadily eroded, and the current militarization of many of the nation's intelligence functions and responsibilities will be viewed as a major mistake in the very near future."

Mr. Brennan, now president of the Analysis Corporation, an intelligence contractor in Virginia, said that if Socom operations were closely coordinated with host countries and American ambassadors, "U.S. interests could be very well served."

But, he added, "if the planned Socom presence in U.S. embassies abroad is an effort to pave the way for unilateral U.S. military operations or to enable defense elements to engage in covert action activities separate from the C.I.A., U.S. problems abroad will be certain to increase significantly."

Paul Gimigliano, a spokesman for the C.I.A., gave a measured response to the program, but emphasized the importance of the agency's station chief in each country.

"There is plenty of work to go around," he said, adding: "One key to success is that intelligence activities in a given country be coordinated, a process in which the chief of station plays a crucial role."

A State Department official said late Tuesday, "We don't have any issue with D.O.D. concerning this," using the initials for Department of Defense. The State Department official said the Military Liaison Element program was set up so that "authority is preserved" for the ambassador or the head of the embassy.

The Special Operations Command has not publicly disclosed the Military Liaison Element mission, and answered questions about the effort only after it was described by officials in other parts of the government who oppose the program.

"M.L.E.'s play a key role in enhancing military, interagency and host nation coordination and planning," said Kenneth S. McGraw, a spokesman for the Special Operations Command, based in Tampa, Fla. The special operations personnel work "with the U.S. ambassador and country team's knowledge to plan and coordinate activities," he added.

Officials involved with the program said its focus is on intelligence and planning and not on conducting combat missions. One official outside the military, who has been briefed on the work but is not authorized to discuss it publicly, said more than 20 teams have been deployed, and that plans call for the effort to be significantly expanded.

In a major shift of the military's center of gravity, the Unified Command Plan signed by President Bush in 2004 says the Special Operations Command now "leads, plans, synchronizes, and as directed, executes global operations against terrorist networks," in addition to its more traditional assignment to train, organize and equip Special Operations forces for missions under regional commanders.

Recently, Gen. Bryan D. Brown, the Socom commander, and his staff have produced a counterterrorism strategy that runs more than 600 pages. It is expected to be presented to Mr. Rumsfeld in the next few weeks for final approval.

According to civilian and military officials who have read or were briefed on the document, it sets forth specific targets, missions and deadlines for action, both immediate and long-term.

One goal of the document is to set the conditions for activity wherever the military may wish to act in the future, to make areas inhospitable to terrorists and to gather the kind of information that the Special Operations Command may need to operate.

The problem is difficult in nations where the American military is not based in large numbers, and in particular where the United States is not at war. Thus, the Military Liaison Elements may not be required in notable hot spots, like parts of the Middle East, where the American military is already deployed in large numbers.

During recent travels abroad, General Brown has sought to explain the program to C.I.A. and F.B.I. officials based at embassies. Joining him for those talks is a political adviser on full-time assignment from the State Department.

Socom also held a conference in Tampa last summer to brief Special Operations commanders from other nations, followed by a session in October for Washington-based personnel from foreign embassies on a range of counterterrorism issues.

One former Special Operations team member said the trick to making the program work is to navigate the bureaucratic rivalries within embassies — and back at the command's headquarters. "All you have to do is make the ambassador, the station chief and Socom all think you are working just for them," he said on condition of anonymity, because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Lee H. Hamilton, who served as vice chairman of the national commission on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said that conflict between the C.I.A. and the Defense Department over paramilitary operations has occurred periodically for decades, and that the 9/11 commission had recommended that the Defense Department be given the lead responsibility for such activity.

But he said the embassy program raised a different issue. "If you have two or three D.O.D. guys wandering around a country, it could certainly cause some problems," Mr. Hamilton said. "It raises the question of just who is in charge of intelligence collection."

The cold war presented the military with targets that were easy to find but hard to kill, like a Soviet armored division. The counterterrorism mission presents targets that are hard to find but relatively easy to kill, like a Qaeda leader.

General Brown and the Special Operations Command now work according to a concept that has become the newest Pentagon catchphrase: "find, fix, finish and follow-up" — shorthand for locating terrorist leaders, tracking them precisely, capturing or killing them, and then using the information gathered to plan another operation.

"The military is great at fixing enemies, and finishing them off, and exploiting any base of operations that we take," said one Special Operations commander on condition of anonymity, because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. "But the 'find' part remains a primitive art. Socom can't kill or capture the bad guys unless the intel people can find them, and this is just not happening."

Lowell Bergman contributed reporting for this article.



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Blaming the victims as Iraq disintegrates
By Stephen Zunes

(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)

The sectarian violence which has swept across Iraq following last month's terrorist bombing of the Shi'ite Golden Mosque in Samarra is yet another example of the tragic consequences of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Until the 2003 US invasion and occupation, Iraq had maintained a longstanding history of secularism and a strong national identity among its Arab population despite its sectarian differences.

Not only has the United States failed to bring a functional democracy to Iraq, neither US forces nor the US-backed Iraqi government in Baghdad have been able to provide the Iraqi people with basic security. This has led many ordinary citizens to turn to extremist sectarian groups for protection, further undermining the Bush administration's insistence that US forces must remain in Iraq in order to prevent a civil war.

Top analysts in the Central Intelligence Agency and State Department, as well as large numbers of Middle East experts, warned that a US invasion of Iraq could result in a violent ethnic and sectarian conflict. Even some of the war's intellectual architects acknowledged as much: in a 1997 paper, prior to becoming major figures in the Bush foreign policy team, David Wurmser, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith predicted that a post-Saddam Iraq would likely be "ripped apart" by sectarianism and other cleavages but called on the US to "expedite" such a collapse anyway.

As a result, the tendency in the US to blame "sectarian conflict" and "long-simmering hatreds" for the Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq is, in effect, blaming the victim.

Fostering fragmentation
One of the longstanding goals of such neo-conservative intellectuals has been to see the Middle East broken up into smaller ethnic or sectarian mini-states, which would include not only large stateless nationalities like the Kurds, but Maronite Christians, Druze, Arab Shi'ites and others.

Such a policy comes not out of respect for the right of self-determination - indeed, the neo-cons have been steadfast opponents of the Palestinians' desire for statehood, even alongside a secure Israel - but out of an imperial quest for divide-and-rule.

The division of the Middle East has long been seen as a means of countering the threat of pan-Arab nationalism and, more recently, pan-Islamist movements. Given the mosaic of ethnicities and sects in the Middle East, with various groupings having mixed together within both urban and rural settings for many generations, the establishment of such ethnic or sectarian mini-states would almost certainly result in forced population transfers, ethnic cleansing and other human suffering.

The risk of Iraq breaking up into a Sunni Kurdish state, a Sunni Arab state and a Shi'ite Arab state is now very real. And, given the intermixing of these populations in Baghdad, Mosul, Kirkuk and scores of other cities, the potential exists for the most violent breakup of a country since the partition of India 60 years ago. Recent weeks have shown ominous signs of what may be yet to come on a massive scale, as scores of Shi'ite families were forced to flee what were once mixed neighborhoods in and around Baghdad.

Even barring a formal breakup of the country, the prospects of a stable, unified country look bleak. As the Los Angeles Times reported on February 26, "The outlines of a future Iraq are emerging: a nation where power is scattered among clerics turned warlords; control over schools, hospitals, railroads, and roads is divided along sectarian lines; graft and corruption subvert good governance; and foreign powers exert influence only over a weak central government."

Much of Iraq's current divisions can be traced to the decision of US occupation authorities immediately following the conquest to abolish the Iraqi army and purge the government bureaucracy - both bastions of secularism - thereby creating a vacuum which was soon filled by sectarian parties and militias.

In addition, the US occupation authorities - in an apparent effort of divide-and-rule - encouraged sectarianism by dividing up authority based not on technical skills or ideological affiliation but ethnic and religious identity. As with Lebanon, however, such efforts have actually exacerbated divisions, with virtually every political question debated not on its merits, but on which group it potentially benefits or harms. This has led to great instability, with political parties, parliamentary blocs and government ministries breaking down along sectarian lines.

Even army divisions are separated, with parts of western Baghdad being patrolled by army units dominated by Sunnis while eastern Baghdad is being patrolled by Shi'ite-dominated units. Without unifying national institutions, the breakup of the country remains a real possibility.

Sectarian conflicts
Theologically, there are fewer differences between Sunnis and Shi'ites than there are between Catholics and Protestants. In small Iraqi towns of mixed populations with only one mosque, Sunnis and Shi'ites worship together. Intermarriage is not uncommon. This harmony is now threatening to unravel.

Shi'ite Muslims, unlike the Sunni Muslims, have a clear hierarchy. (Ayatollahs, for example, are essentially the equivalent of Catholic cardinals.) As a result, the already-existing clerical-based social structures in the Shi'ite community were among the few organizations to survive Saddam's totalitarian regime and were therefore more easily capable of organizing themselves politically when US forces overthrew the government in Baghdad in 2003. Sunni and secular groupings, then, found themselves at a relative disadvantage when they suddenly found themselves free to organize.

As a result, the US initially insisted on indefinite rule by Iraqis picked directly or indirectly by Washington. However, when hundreds of thousands of Shi'ites took to the streets in January 2004 demanding the right to choose their country's leaders, the Bush administration reluctantly agreed to hold direct elections.

Having been dominated by Sunnis under the Ba'athists, the Hashemites and the Ottomans, the Shi'ite majority was eager to rule. Not surprisingly, elections have brought Shi'ite religious parties to power which have since marginalized other groups and imposed their repressive and misogynist version of Islamic law in parts of Iraq where they dominate, particularly in the south of the country.

Sunni opposition to Shi'ite dominance does not just stem from resentment at losing their privileged position in Iraqi political life under the former dictatorship. Indeed, Saddam suppressed his fellow Sunni Arabs along with Sunni Kurds and Shi'ite Arabs.

What US officials have failed to recognize is that Iraq's Sunni Arab minority, regardless of its feelings about Saddam's regime, has long identified with Arab nationalism. Not surprisingly, the armed resistance which emerged following Saddam's removal from power three years ago has come largely from the Sunni Arab community.

The insurgency has also targeted the US-backed Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi government, which came to power as a result of the US invasion and which many see as being puppets of the US occupation. They also fear that the Iraqi government may identify more with their fellow Shi'ites of Iran than with other Arabs. More radical Sunni chauvinists, many of whom are foreign Salafi extremists like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, have engaged in widespread terrorist attacks again Shi'ite civilians and their holy places.

Despite its dependence on the US and ties to Iran, however, the Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi government has its own agenda. Culturally and linguistically, Iraq's Shi'ites are every bit as Arab as the Sunnis. Yet while the vast majority of the country's Shi'ite Arab majority has no desire to be pawns of either Iran or the US, the response by the Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi government and Shi'ite militias has done little to lessen Sunni fears and hostility.

Seeing their government faced with a growing insurgency and their community falling victim to terrorist violence, the Shi'ites have responded with aggressive counter-insurgency and counter-terrorist operations against the Sunni community. Human rights abuses by Shi'ites against the Sunni minority have increased dramatically, polarizing the country still further.

Even before the latest upsurge in sectarian violence, the Baghdad morgue was reporting that dozens of bodies of Sunni men with gunshot wounds to the back of the head would arrive at the same time every week, including scores of corpses with wrists bound by police handcuffs.

Death squads
John Pace, the outgoing head of the United Nations' human rights monitoring group in Iraq, has reported that hundreds of Sunnis are being subjected to summary execution and death from torture every month by Iraqi government death squads, primarily controlled by the Ministry of the Interior.

High-ranking American officers have reported that radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's al-Mehdi Army maintains a strong presence in the regular police force, including up to 90% of the 35,000 officers currently working in the northeastern part of Baghdad. In addition, the Iranian-trained Badr Organization dominates police commando units. A police unit known as the Punishment Committee goes after civilians believed to be flouting Islamic laws or the authority of Shi'ite militia leaders, particularly Sunnis.

The Shi'ite government of Iran, long cited for its human rights abuses by both the Bush administration and reputable human rights organizations, has actively supported Shi'ite militias within the Iraqi government and security forces. (Despite this, the Bush administration and its supporters, including many prominent Democrats, have been putting forth the ludicrous theory that Iran is actually supporting the anti-Shi'ite and anti-American Sunni insurgency.)

Iraq's former interior minister Bayan Jabr was trained by Iran's infamous Revolutionary Guards and later served as a leader of the Badr Organization, the militia of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Americans have also trained Interior Ministry police and commandos, though - unlike some notorious cases in recent Latin American history - there is little evidence to suggest that US trainers have actively encouraged death squad activity.

Still, there is little question that actions by US occupation troops over the past three years - such as the torture of detainees, the hair-trigger response at checkpoints, the liberal use of force in heavily-populated civilian neighborhoods and the targeted assassinations of suspected insurgent leaders - have contributed to the climate of impunity exhibited by forces of the Iraqi government.

Pace has also observed how US troops are making things worse by rounding up large numbers of innocent young Sunni men and detaining them for months. Noting how such "military intervention causes serious human rights and humanitarian problems to large numbers of innocent civilians", he lamented at the fact that many of these detainees, in reaction to their maltreatment, later joined Sunni terrorist groups following their release.

Despite last month's terrorist bombing of the Shi'ite shrine and the tragic killings that followed, however, there were also impressive signs of unity. In cities throughout Iraq, Sunnis and Shi'ites mobilized to protect each other's mosques and neighborhoods.

Even the young firebrand Shi'ite cleric Muqtada emphasized to his followers, "It was not the Sunnis who attacked the shrine ... but rather the occupation [forces] and Ba'athists." He called on his followers not to attack Sunni mosques and ordered his Mehdi Army to "protect both Shi'ite and Sunni shrines". He went on to say, "My message to the Iraqi people is to stand united and bonded, and not to fall into the Western trap. The West is trying to divide the Iraqi people." In a later interview, Muqtada claimed, "We say that the occupiers are responsible for such crises [Golden Mosque bombing] ... there is only one enemy. The occupier."

Similarly, Sunnis were quick to express their solidarity with Shi'ites in a series of demonstrations in Samarra and elsewhere. Anti-American signs and slogans permeated these marches. Indeed, there is a widespread belief that it was the US, not fellow Muslims or Iraqis, which bears responsibility for the tragedy.

Even Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi claimed the US was responsible for the bombing of the Golden Mosque, "especially since occupation forces did not comply with curfew orders imposed by the Iraqi government". He added, "Evidence indicates that the occupation may be trying to undermine and weaken the Iraqi government."

Though charges of a US conspiracy are presumably groundless, it does underscore the growing opposition by both communities to the ongoing US military presence in their country and how the United States has little credibility left with either community as a mediator, peacekeeper, overseer or anything else.

And it underscores the urgency for the United States to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.

Stephen Zunes is Middle East editor for Foreign Policy in Focus. He is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and the author of Tinderbox: US Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, 2003).

(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus )

March 8, 2006
C.I.A. Fights Effort by Libby's Lawyers for Bush Briefings
By DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON, March 7 — The Central Intelligence Agency objected to producing presidential briefing documents sought by lawyers for the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, according to an affidavit unsealed Tuesday in the C.I.A. leak case.

A C.I.A. official wrote in the affidavit that turning over copies of the highly classified President's Daily Brief would interfere with the agency's responsibilities to provide the president with crucial and timely intelligence.

The briefing., wrote the agency official, Marilyn A. Dorn, is "the most sensitive report" produced by the agency's Directorate of Intelligence, and it is the basis for a continuous dialogue between the president and the country's intelligence agencies.

Lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former top Cheney aide charged in the case, requested 300 to 500 documents, related to presidential briefing material from May 2003 to March 2004, as a crucial part of his defense to perjury and obstruction charges.

In response to the agency's objections, Mr. Libby's lawyers said in a court filing on Tuesday that they needed the material to show that the issues Mr. Libby dealt with in the presidential briefs "dwarfed in importance" the matters related to the exposure of the identity of a covert C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson.

Ms. Dorn, an information review officer at the National Clandestine Service, wrote that it would take the C.I.A. about nine months to prepare the documents sought by Mr. Libby's lawyers, in part because Mr. Libby did not always receive the same briefing material prepared for the president and the vice president.

The presidential brief is prepared each day by a small staff at the C.I.A, Ms. Dorn wrote. "Moreover, the job would divert their precious time and effort away from their primary task: preparing breaking intelligence for the president's immediate attention," she added.



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It's an Awful Lot of Money to Makes Us Less Safe and Less Free
Half a Trillion Dollars
By WERTHER

Ever since President Eisenhower's farewell address, there have been sporadic warnings about the Military Industrial Complex. Over the last couple of decades, critics like Ernest Fitzgerald and Chuck Spinney have performed a valuable public service by uncovering the Pentagon's lunatic potlatch schemes and dragging them before the bar of public opinion. Lately, organizations such as the Project on Government Oversight, the Center for Defense Information, and the Committee against Government Waste have been in a continuous pother about the riot of pork-barrel spending in the military budget.

These critiques, entirely accurate as far as they go, yet lull us into a false sense of security. If only we were to institute reform of the Congressional appropriations process, or ban earmarks, or establish a line-item veto, the "good" defense spending (the paean in these critiques is always to "readiness accounts") would no longer be at the mercy of the "bad" defense spending (inserted in the black of night by such felonious rogues as Duke Cunningham).

Let us be plain. Any organization that employs lethal force, operates in secrecy, always gets what it wants, and is unaccountable to the citizens is indistinguishable from a protection racket. And if, in return for surrendering their wallets, the citizenry is made less safe (as the more objective intelligence reports have repeatedly warned about the $300+ billion Iraq war), then some hole-in-corner reform is not going to get us anywhere. The Soviet Union in its senile post-Brezhnev phase had numerous anti-corruption drives, to no avail. The whole rotten edifice collapsed only when the Russian people ceased to believe in the system they had suffered under and placed such childish hopes in.

Although the Duke Cunningham saga achieved screaming headlines, one aspect of it gained almost no notice. When it did, its importance was misinterpreted: Precisely what was MZM Corp., and its spin-off ADCS, ostensibly doing when they weren't pillaging the taxpayers? According to Marcus Stern, the Copley News Service reporter who broke the corruption story, Cunningham was handing out contracts to MZM involving CIFA, the Pentagon's secretive Counterintelligence Field Activity.

Discussing this matter with Brian Lamm on C-Span's 3 March 2006 Washington Journal, Stern misconstrued the significance of the MZM-CIFA link. As Stern would have it, the connection demonstrated Cunningham's perfidy in so far as he was compromising post-9/11 national security by bestowing contracts on a corrupt business that overcharged the government for conducting activity intended to keep us safe from terrorists.

Would that it were that simple, but that would be the facile interpretation. CIFA, as we now know, is a Department of Defense organization that spies on American citizens, in violation of post-Vietnam directives prohibiting the military from conducting surveillance against U.S. citizens on American soil. Precisely replicating the abuses that instigated the ban in the first place, CIFA is collecting dossiers on citizens engaged in lawful political activity, e.g., a group of elderly Quakers in Lakeland, Florida who opposed the government's policy in Iraq.

The charitable interpretation is that a lot of shiftless bureaucrats at the Office of the Secretary of Defense have way too much time and money on their hands.[1] It's not enough that they do a miserable job at what they are constitutionally charged to do -- fight wars -- they apparently can spare the manpower to poke through people's dresser drawers even as they complain about how thin they are stretched due to the Iraq war.

But it is no coincidence that a secret organization which abuses constitutional rights would be mired in corrupt contracting. Inevitably, secrecy without accountability leads to abuse, which in turn leads to rampant corruption. It is a prevalent myth that "toughness," or, if you like, "taking the gloves off," is a sign of business-like efficiency and rectitude. A police department that routinely beats suspects and covers it up is invariably a corrupt one, with officers casually perjuring themselves in trials and valuables conveniently disappearing from evidence lockers.

Thus it is no surprise that CIFA, whose reason for being is abuse of the Constitution, is connected with criminals like Duke Cunningham and Brent Wilkes, ADCS's CEO. Nor should it surprise us that Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the Executive Director of the CIA, is under investigation by the Pentagon's inspector general for his links to Wilkes. [2]

Is it an occasion for shocked disbelief that Halliburton, the beneficiary of billions of dollars of no-bid contracts, should charge the government (meaning you, the taxpayer) for meals never provided for U.S. troops, gouge for fuel, and simultaneously threaten employees who object to these practices? It is merely an illustration of the nexus between greed and abuse.

The people at the top who ultimately order such things are insulated from accountability by multiple layers of bureaucratic operatives. At the sharp end of the spear, unlettered lieges carry out the plans, and take the fall should anything go wrong.

While Kapos (not S.S. men, but the criminal element among prisoners) actually ran the concentration camps and squeezed the prisoners of their possessions and paid off the S.S. guards, Reinhard Heydrich played the violin (by all accounts well) and joked with his staff. While the criminal element ran the Gulag, Director of the KGB Andropov gulled the Western media with stories about his affinity for single malt Scotch and jazz.

So it is with our National Security State: poor West Virginia hillbillies in reserve units are ordered to carry out the wet work. Should plans go awry, they take the fall. A slap on the wrist, perhaps a career-killing reprimand, might be meted out to junior officers. General officers are probably secure from even a hint of opprobrium, regardless of what they ordered or knew.

Although responsibility ultimately rests with the Secretary of Defense (who in October 2001 made a big public point of saying that prisoners -- does this mean in all future wars? -- would not be treated according to the Geneva Convention), he has insulated himself, or so he thinks, by not writing down the specific orders.

Like his historical models, Secretary Rumsfeld keeps well clear of the sordid details of what trouble our half trillion dollars is buying. By choice, he would rather turn his full attention to dressing down Pentagon stewards who fail to slice the garnishes in the approved manner, or humiliate career officers who fail to grasp the crony capitalist potential of Transformation for the corporate bottom line. But the principal effect of his half trillion dollar protection racket is to make us all a little less prosperous, and to stir up such insensate hatred abroad as will trouble the sleep of our grandchildren when they are adults.

Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.

[1] Yes, we know they all work nominal 14-hour days. They simply do not produce anything remotely useful to the republic. Staff meetings to determine the amount of loot to pry out of a somnolent Congress, memo-writing on how to evade the Geneva Convention, and fending off tirades from the Secretary of Defense about meal presentation in the executive dining room do not count.

[2] "Exclusive: Top CIA Official Under Investigation," ABC News, 3 March 2006.

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Former CIA Officer: Dubai Ports Not So Secure
By Jeff Johnson
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
March 08, 2006

(CNSNews.com) - Political observers say that when two Republicans -- a liberal, New England senator and a conservative, Pacific Coast congressman -- come together to oppose a White House plan, the president had better take notice.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, is known as one of the most liberal members of the GOP in Congress. She also serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is known as a strong conservative and national security proponent.

While Collins and Duncan are often at odds on issues, they are united in their opposition to a proposal that would allow Dubai Ports World (DPW) -- a wholly-owned subsidiary of the government of Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) -- to manage some operations at 14 U.S. ports.

Hunter announced legislation Tuesday that would prohibit majority ownership of any U.S. "system or asset - physical or virtual - that is so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such system or asset would have a debilitating effect on national security, economic security, or public health and safety" by foreign governments or companies. The proposal would direct the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to compile a "critical infrastructure" list of assets to be protected from foreign control.

While the legislation would conceivably cover a much broader section of U.S. commerce, Hunter made it clear that his immediate intent is to block a White House-backed deal that would give DPW some measure of control over port operations in Miami and Tampa, Fla.; Beaumont, Galveston, Houston and Port Arthur, Texas; Baltimore; Camden, N.J.; Davisville, R.I.; New Orleans; Norfolk, Va.; Philadelphia; Portland, Maine and Wilmington, Del.

Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness (CMR), said Tuesday that the political differences between Hunter and Collins lend credibility to their opposition to the DPW plan and prove that it is not ideologically driven.

"The base is being fractured here. Whether it's the more liberal Republicans who would back Susan Collins, or the more conservative ones who respect Duncan Hunter a great deal, this is serious," Donnelly said. "When people of that caliber on both sides of the president's own party start raising questions, the president needs to pay attention."

Donnelly said she has not worked with Collins, who often disagrees with CMR on military issues, but she is familiar with Hunter and believes his opposition to the DPW deal is sincere.

"He must have good reasons and he may have reasons we don't even know about for doing what he's doing," Donnelly said. "He's known for doing his own investigations and he may be doing that now."

Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer who now heads the Business Exposure Reduction Group (BERG), believes he knows what could be motivating Hunter, Collins and other members of Congress to oppose the DPW deal.

"There is current intelligence that individuals with ties to jihadist terrorist groups have sought refuge in Dubai/UAE, within the last three months," from countries that are considered sympathetic to terrorists, Johnson said. "They felt more secure going to the UAE."

But President Bush has personally defended DPW, arguing that all security concerns have been addressed.

"If there was any doubt in my mind or people in my administration's mind that our ports would be less secure and the American people endangered, this deal wouldn't go forward," Bush said Feb. 28.

The president noted that DPW is purchasing a British company that currently holds the contracts to the port operations and that other U.S. ports have been managed by foreign-owned companies for years.

"What kind of signal does it send throughout the world if it's okay for a British company to manage the ports," Bush asked, "but not a company that has been secure, been cleared for security purposes from the Arab world?"

But Johnson challenged the president's assertion that DPW-run ports are secure.

"When you look at three of the top world ports for smuggling, counterfeit and contraband activity, those are, by my count, Hong Kong, Dubai and Panama. Dubai Ports World controls two of the three" Johnson said, referring to Dubai and Hong Kong.

"The White House is allowing commercial interests to trump any concern about security," Johnson said. "And I think Republicans like Collins and Hunter are smart enough to recognize that that's a non-starter."

Johnson's company has been investigating port operations in Dubai on behalf of a client as part of a federal racketeering lawsuit.

"One of the things we observed in the course of collecting evidence in that case was cigarette smuggling that started with cigarettes that would come out of Europe and the United States, go to Panama and then were shipped to ... ports in Dubai," Johnson said. "We also had evidence and saw direct evidence of other types of products being smuggled through Dubai, going into Pakistan through Afghanistan and going into Iran and going into Iraq."

Among the "other types of products" allegedly smuggled through Dubai, Johnson listed the nuclear technology now in the hands of Iran.

"If Dubai Ports World runs the smuggling operations or allows them or does not enforce any kinds of preventative measures in Dubai, just think what could happen in any of these other ports," he continued, "The techniques required to smuggle nuclear material or weapons are no different from those required to smuggle cigarettes or other less lethal, not as dangerous material."

As an example, Johnson referenced a 1992 terrorist attack in which a smuggler was led to believe he was transporting contraband cash on a flight full of Jewish merchants. Unknown to the smuggler, he was, in fact, carrying a bomb, which Johnson said, "blew the plane out of the air."

While President Bush has praised the governments of Dubai and the UAE for their cooperation in the war on terror, Johnson said Americans should listen carefully.

"It would be one thing if the owners of Dubai Ports World were the same individuals in the United Arab Emirates who are cooperating with us in the efforts to combat terrorism, but they are not," Johnson said. "There are elements in the UAE government that are helping us and there are elements that are not helpful."

Johnson believes many in Washington who tentatively support the president in the controversy could be converted into opponents if they would honestly ask themselves one question, which he calls "the gold standard."

"Would Israel allow Dubai Ports World to run its ports at Haifa? If the answer is 'yes,' then we should say 'okay,'" Johnson said. "But, you know what? The answer is 'no.'"

http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/libra...60301-voa02.htm


Congress, Legal Scholars Debate US Domestic Spying
By Jim Malone
Washington
01 March 2006

President Bush's decision to use the secretive National Security Agency to monitor some domestic communications as part of the war on terror remains the focus of intense debate in Congress and among legal scholars.

The Bush administration says the NSA program targets international calls either to or from the United States that involve people with suspected links to terrorism.

The eavesdropping effort bypasses a 1978 law that requires the government to get a warrant from a special surveillance court before phone calls and other communications involving U.S. citizens or legal residents can be monitored.

Opposition Democrats have taken the lead in questioning the legality of the domestic spying effort, which they say is a threat to civil liberties.

"I believe they are running roughshod over the Constitution and are hiding behind inflammatory rhetoric, demanding Americans blindly trust their decisions," said Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Bush administration officials contend that the president has the power to authorize the program under the general authority granted to him in the Constitution to protect the country during wartime and because Congress authorized military action against Afghanistan in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

But even some conservative legal scholars are raising objections to what they see as an overly broad interpretation of presidential power.

"The theory invoked by the president to justify eavesdropping by the NSA in contradiction to FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] would equally justify mail openings, burglaries, torture or internment camps, all in the name of gathering foreign intelligence," said Bruce Fein, a legal expert who worked in the Justice Department during the Reagan administration. "Unless rebuked, it will lie around like a loaded weapon, ready to be used by any incumbent who claims an urgent need." He testified at a recent Senate hearing on the domestic surveillance program.

Supporters of the domestic spying program counter that the effort is narrowly targeted and is a necessary tool in the war on terror.

James Woolsey served as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency for a time during the Clinton administration. He told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the 1978 law, known as FISA, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is outdated.

"We are in the gun sights of more than one international terrorist Islamist organization that have ties, some of them, to states. And these are shifting alliances," he said. "This is a hard kind of thing to keep up with and trying to do it spy by spy, case by case, pleading by pleading, as one does in the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court, is not only difficult, it is absolutely impossible."

The White House has been focused in recent weeks on reassuring conservatives as well as liberals that the NSA monitoring program targets only those with suspected links to terrorists and does not threaten civil liberties.

"It is focused solely on international communications that involve a known al-Qaida or suspected al-Qaida terrorist or affiliated al-Qaida terrorist," said presidential spokesman Scott McClellan.

Congressional Republicans are now struggling to find a unified proposal that would allow the legislative branch to have oversight on the surveillance program.

But many legal experts believe the issue will eventually wind up before the Supreme Court, which may have to decide whether the president overstepped his authority by ignoring a law enacted by Congress. University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato says the debate is not a new one.

"This is an enduring controversy. We are going to see the same arguments made in 2006 that have been made repeatedly in American history. I doubt we come any closer to resolving the ultimate dispute. You have top reach some kind of reasonable balance between individual liberty and security," he said.

Professor Sabato also says the eavesdropping controversy could be an issue in the November congressional election campaign.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/libra...0301-usia01.htm

01 March 2006

Iran, North Korea Threaten To Develop, Spread Nuclear Weapons
Nuclear proliferation second only to terrorism as danger to United States

In-Depth Coverage
Washington – Iran and North Korea continue to present the greatest challenges to international efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons, say leading members of the U.S. intelligence community.

In a February 28 global threat assessment before the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, and Lieutenant General Michael D. Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, agreed that the continuing threat of nuclear proliferation remains a clear and present danger to the United States, second only to the threat of a terrorist attack. (See related article.)

For the past 20 years, Negroponte said, Iran has conducted a clandestine uranium enrichment program, a violation of its agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency. (See related article.)

“We believe Iran is committed to acquiring a nuclear weapon and is currently developing the infrastructure to produce highly enriched uranium and plutonium for that purpose,” Maples said. (See related article.)

The ascent of hardliners in the Iranian government who resumed suspicious nuclear activities in violation of its nonproliferation obligations further has heightened the U.S. intelligence community’s concern, said Negroponte. (See related article.)

“While Tehran probably does not yet have a nuclear weapon and probably has not yet produced or acquired the necessary fissile material, the danger that it will do so is a reason for immediate concern,” Negroponte said.

Negroponte and Maples told senators that a nuclear-armed Iran is especially dangerous, given its stockpile of ballistic missiles, believed by the intelligence community to be the largest in the Middle East.

Maples added that Iran currently is developing longer-range missile systems potentially capable of striking targets as far away as Central Europe.

In addition to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Maples also told senators that U.S. intelligence experts “believe that Iran maintains offensive chemical and biological weapons capabilities in various stages of development as well.”

NORTH KOREA CONTINUES ITS CHALLENGE

Unlike Iran, North Korea claims already to have nuclear weapons, -- “a claim that we assess is probably true,” said Negroponte.

Negroponte did not provide further details on the projected size of North Korea’s potential inventory of nuclear weapons, but said that Pyongyang’s weapons program is seen by its leaders as a means to ensure the regime’s security, a deterrent to superior U.S. and South Korean troops and a mark of international prestige.

In addition, Maples told senators that North Korea continues to invest in the development of ballistic missiles, not only for defense but also to sell to foreign nations.

Even though the United States and North Korea’s neighbors continue to seek a solution through the Six-Party Talks, both Negroponte and Maples agreed that North Korea remains a major challenge to global nuclear nonproliferation regimes. (See related article.)

Negroponte said that the intelligence community does not know under what conditions North Korea would give up nuclear weapons; Maples gave senators an even more pessimistic assessment.

“Because of its strong security, nationalistic and economic motivations for possessing nuclear weapons, we are uncertain whether the North Korean government can be persuaded to fully relinquish its program,” he said.

Prepared remarks to the Senate Armed Services Committee from Negroponte and Maples are available on the Web sites of their respective offices.

For more information, see Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.


(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/libra...0228-afps01.htm

Iran, North Korea, China Emerging as Threats
By Sgt. Sara Wood, USA
American Forces Press Service

In-Depth Coverage
WASHINGTON, Feb. 28, 2006 – After terrorism, the ongoing development of weapons of mass destruction is the second major threat to the safety of the U.S. and its allies, and Iran and North Korea are both emerging as potential dangers in that area, a top U.S. official told a Senate committee here today.

"The time when a few states had monopolies over weapons of mass destruction is fading," said John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence, at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on worldwide threats to U.S. national security.

"Technologies, often dual-use, move freely in our globalized economy, as do the scientific personnel who design them," he said. "The potential dangers of weapons of mass destruction proliferation are so grave that we must do everything possible to discover and disrupt it."

Many nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency share concerns about Iran's nuclear program, Negroponte said. Iran conducted a clandestine uranium-enrichment program for nearly two decades in violation of an IAEA safeguards agreement, he said, and despite its claims to the contrary, officials think that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons. Iran probably does not yet have a nuclear weapon or the materials to make one, but the danger that it will acquire the materials is a reason for immediate concern, he said.

"The integration of nuclear weapons into Iran's ballistic systems would be destabilizing beyond the Middle East," he said.

Officials believe that Iran maintains offensive chemical and biological weapons capabilities in various stages of development, Army Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said at the hearing. Also, Iran is developing ballistic missiles with the capability to strike Tel Aviv, Israel, and even central Europe, he said.

North Korea also threatens international security, but unlike Iran, North Korea claims to already have nuclear weapons, Negroponte said. U.S. officials believe this claim is true, because North Korean leaders see nuclear weapons as the best way to deter superior forces and to ensure regime security, and as a lever for economic gain and a source of prestige, he said.

Maples said that because of strong security, national and economic motivations for possessing nuclear weapons, officials are uncertain whether the North Korean government can be persuaded to fully relinquish its program.

As China upgrades its military and gains political influence, it too is emerging as a threat to U.S. national security, Negroponte said. China has seen consistently high economic growth rates, which have fueled a military modernization program and increased the country's force capabilities, he said.

China has been reaching out to its neighboring countries to make economic and political connections, Negroponte said. Also, the Chinese military is acquiring modern weapons and hardware, improving doctrine, reforming training, and making improvements in critical support functions, he said.

However, despite the improvements, China still faces a challenge in keeping unemployment and rural discontent down and maintaining increasing living standards, Negroponte said. To do this, China must solve difficult economic and legal problems, improve the education system, reduce environmental degradation, and improve governance by combating corruption, he said.

"Indeed, China's rise may be hobbled by systemic problems and the Communist Party's resistance to the demands for political participation that economic growth generates," he said. "Beijing's determination to repress real or perceived challenges - from dispossessed peasants to religious organizations - could lead to serious instability at home and less effective policies abroad."

Other issues will continue to affect national security, such as improving technology and weakly governed states throughout the world, Maples said, but the government remains vigilant to protecting the U.S. homeland, allies and interests abroad.

"Our nation is engaged in a long war against terrorism and violent extremism, and we are faced with a multitude of threats that can affect our national security," he said. "The defense intelligence professionals will continue to provide the necessary information critical to our warfighters, defense planners and national security policy makers."


http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Feb2006/20060228_4344.html

http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/libra...0228-afps02.htm

Terrorism Biggest Threat to National Security, Officials Say
By Sgt. Sara Wood, USA
American Forces Press Service

In-Depth Coverage
WASHINGTON, Feb. 28, 2006 – Terrorism remains the pre-eminent threat to U.S. national security and interests abroad. But if progress continues at the current pace in Iraq, the terrorists can be defeated there and the U.S. can gain a foothold in the war on terror, a top U.S. official said here today.

Entrenched grievances such as corruption, injustice and the slow pace of economic, social and political change in many Muslim nations continue to fuel the global jihadist movement, and nowhere is that movement more acutely seen than in Iraq, said John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence, at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on worldwide threats to U.S. national security.

Sunni Arab hostility, the primary enabler of the extremist movement, is likely to remain high in 2006, he said, and Iraqi security forces need to develop better command-and-control capabilities to become more effective against the insurgents. However, encouraging developments in Iraq give hope for the defeat of the insurgents, he said.

Insurgents have been unable to consolidate gains from their attacks and haven't established any long-term territorial control in Iraq, Negroponte said. Also, they were unable to disrupt the two national elections last year, they have not developed a political strategy to gain support beyond their Sunni Arab base, and they have not been able to coordinate nationwide operations, he said.

On the contrary, the Iraqi security forces are taking on more demanding missions, becoming more independent, and providing better stability for the Iraqi economy to grow, Negroponte said. Another sign of improvement in the country is the drastic increase in Sunni participation in the political process, he said.

"I believe that if you take the overall situation in Iraq -- political and security situation - progress is being made, and if we continue to make that kind of progress, yes we can win in Iraq," he said.

The insurgency in Iraq is complex and resilient, but coalition forces have been able to significantly impact al Qaeda in Iraq by killing or capturing many of its leaders, Army Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said at the hearing. The coalition has been able to restrict the flow of personnel, money and material and degrade operations, he said.

Sunni Arabs form the core of the insurgency in Iraq, Maples said, and fewer foreign fighters are joining their ranks. Insurgent leaders exploit social, economic and historical grievances to recruit support, and are willing to use familial, tribal and professional relationships to advance their agenda, he said.

The insurgents' philosophies and actions are adding urgency to a debate within Islam about the role of religion in government, Negroponte said. As this debate evolves, Muslims are becoming more politically aware and active, he said, but the majority doesn't lean toward extremism.

"Most Muslims reject the extremist message and the violent agendas of the global jihadists," he said. "Indeed, as people of all backgrounds endorse democratic principles of freedom, equality and the rule of law, they will be able to couple these principles with their religious beliefs, whatever they may be, to build better futures for their communities."


http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Feb2006/20060228_4340.html

http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/libra...60220-voa01.htm

Controversy Deepens Over Iraq Prewar Intelligence
By Gary Thomas and John Shields
Washington, D.C.
20 February 2006


One of the puzzling questions hanging over the Iraq war is: how did the intelligence turn out to be so wrong? Critics of the Iraq policy have charged that intelligence was manipulated by Bush administration officials to win public support for going to war. It is a charge that is vehemently denied by the administration. As VOA correspondent Gary Thomas reports, a former intelligence insider has reignited that debate.

For 28 years, Paul Pillar labored deep within the Central Intelligence Agency, eventually rising to become National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. But, upon retiring recently from the CIA, he did something intelligence officers generally shy away from -- he went public.

In an article for the highly respected journal Foreign Affairs, he alleged the Bush administration had selectively chosen bits of intelligence -- "cherry-picking," in intelligence parlance -- to justify its already made decision to go to war.

The article has set off a firestorm, as the administration has repeatedly and vehemently denied manipulating intelligence. Late last year, Vice President Dick Cheney said this: "What is not legitimate, and what I will again say is dishonest and reprehensible, is the suggestion by some U.S. senators that the president of the United States or any member of his administration purposely misled the American people on prewar intelligence."

The intelligence failure on Iraq -- weapons of mass destruction that the administration insisted Saddam Hussein had turned out not to exist -- acutely embarrassed the intelligence community. Intelligence officers have insisted that they did not "cook" or distort the intelligence to satisfy the administration.

In a VOA interview, Paul Pillar says administration officials wanted to demonstrate some substantive link between Saddam Hussein's regime and al-Qaida, when in fact, he says, no such links existed.

"The main thing that happened there, particularly with reference to this issue of, was there a relationship between the Saddam regime and al-Qaida -- was a selective use of bits and pieces of reporting to try to build the case that in this case there was some kind of alliance without really reflecting the analytic judgment of the intelligence community that there was not."

In his U.N. presentation in 2003, Secretary Powell spoke of alleged contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida.

"Some believe, some claim these contacts do not amount to much,” said Mr. Powell. “They say Saddam Hussein's secular tyranny and al-Qaida's religious tyranny do not mix. I am not comforted by this thought. Ambition and hatred are enough to bring Iraq and al-Qaida together, enough so al-Qaida could learn how to build more sophisticated bombs and learn how to forge documents, and enough so that al-Qaida could turn to Iraq for help in acquiring expertise on weapons of mass destruction."

In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute late last year, Vice President Cheney again strongly denied the intelligence had been manipulated and that any suggestion that it was a lie.

Paul Pillar says while there was no direct pressure to alter intelligence analyses on Iraq, he argues that the administration's determination to go to war created a climate that choked off objectivity and squelched dissenting views among intelligence analysts.

"If, instead, the analyst is operating in an environment in which he knows decisions have already been made, in which he knows the policymaker has a particular preference for what would suit his purposes in mustering support for that decision -- well, that's an entirely different sort of thing.” Mr. Pillar told us. “And it certainly reduces any inclination analysts may have to challenge a conventional wisdom or a consensus judgment, as we had on Iraqi W.M.D."

Pillar says he doesn't want to rehash the past, but provoke a debate on how to fix relations between the intelligence community and policy makers before the next major crisis.

"What I have in mind is looking forward and having a relationship between two parts of our government that is sound enough and healthy enough and proper enough that the next time a very difficult, sticky issue comes up like Iraq, that we will see that relationship work well."

Even now, debate is underway about the nature and extent of Iran's nuclear program. It is a debate, says Paul Pillar, that could benefit from the missteps on the road to war in Iraq.

Published on Thursday, January 22, 2004 by Knight-Ridder
CIA Officers Warn of Iraq Civil War, Contradicting Bush's Optimism
by Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay

WASHINGTON - CIA officers in Iraq are warning that the country may be on a path to civil war, current and former U.S. officials said Wednesday, starkly contradicting the upbeat assessment that President Bush gave in his State of the Union address.

The CIA officers' bleak assessment was delivered verbally to Washington this week, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the classified information involved.

The warning echoed growing fears that Iraq's Shiite majority, which has until now grudgingly accepted the U.S. occupation, could turn to violence if its demands for direct elections are spurned.


Tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims protest in the streets Baghdad, Iraq. The protesters are demanding a fair election process for Iraq. (Photo/ Tom Pennington)

Meanwhile, Iraq's Kurdish minority is pressing its demand for autonomy and shares of oil revenue.

"Both the Shiites and the Kurds think that now's their time," said one intelligence officer. "They think that if they don't get what they want now, they'll probably never get it. Both of them feel they've been betrayed by the United States before."

These dire scenarios were discussed at meetings this week by Bush, his top national security aides and the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity.

Another senior official said the concerns over a possible civil war weren't confined to the CIA but are "broadly held within the government," including by regional experts at the State Department and National Security Council.

Top officials are scrambling to save the U.S. exit strategy after concluding that Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al Husseini al Sistani, is unlikely to drop his demand for elections for an interim assembly that would choose an interim government by June 30.

Bremer would then hand over power to the interim government.

The CIA hasn't yet put its officers' warnings about a potential Iraqi civil war in writing, but the senior official said he expected a formal report "momentarily."

"In the discussion with Bremer in the last few days, several very bad possibilities have been outlined," he said.

Bush, in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, insisted that an insurgency against the U.S. occupation, conducted primarily by minority Sunni Muslims who enjoyed power under Saddam Hussein, "will fail, and the Iraqi people will live in freedom."

"Month by month, Iraqis are assuming more responsibility for their own security and their own future," the president said.

Bush didn't directly address the crisis over the Shiites' political demands.

Shiites, who dominate the regions from Baghdad south to the borders of Kuwait and Iran, comprise some 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people.

Several U.S. officials acknowledged that Sistani is unlikely to be "rolled," as one put it, and as a result Bremer's plan for restoring Iraqi sovereignty and ending the U.S. occupation by June 30 is in peril.

The Bremer plan, negotiated with the U.S.-installed Iraqi Governing Council, calls for caucuses in each of Iraq's 18 provinces to choose the interim national assembly, which would in turn select Iraq's first post-Saddam government.

The first direct elections wouldn't be held until the end of 2005.

In an interview with Knight Ridder on Wednesday, a top cleric in the Shiite holy city of Najaf appeared to confirm the fears of potential civil war.

"Everything has its own time, but we are saying that we don't accept the occupiers getting involved with the Iraqis' affairs," said Sheikh Ali Najafi, whose father, Grand Ayatollah Bashir al Najafi, is, along with Sistani, one of the four most senior clerics. "I don't trust the Americans - not even for one blink."

If the United States went ahead with the caucus plan and ended the military occupation, the interim government wouldn't last long, he said.

"The Iraqi people would know how to deal with those people," he said, smiling. "They would kick them out."

U.S. and British officials hinted Wednesday that they might bow to the demand for some kind of elections, after saying for weeks that holding free and fair elections in time for the handover of sovereignty would be impossible.

"We've always favored elections," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said after he and other top Bush aides briefed senators. "The only question is - the tension was, if your goal is to get sovereignty passed to the Iraqis so that they feel they have a stake in their future, can you do it faster with caucuses or can you do it faster with elections?"

Rumsfeld was responding to comments by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who opened the door Wednesday to elections in Iraq earlier than planned.

"The discussion, which has been stimulated by Ayatollah Sistani, is whether there could be an element of elections injected into the earlier part of the process," Straw said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

"We have to work with great respect for him and similar leaders," he said. "We want elections as soon as it is feasible to hold them."

Shiite clerics have become more forceful in their denunciation of the caucus plan and have organized increasingly large, albeit peaceful, demonstrations demanding elections.

State Department officials said no changes to the Bremer plan are being formally considered. They said much depends on the findings of a U.N. assessment team that the Bush administration has asked U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to send to examine the feasibility of elections.

One option being informally discussed is to delay the transfer of power until later in 2004, which might give the United Nations time to organize some sort of elections, said one official.

But that is almost certain to be opposed by White House political aides who want the occupation over and many U.S. troops gone by this summer to bolster Bush's re-election chances, the official said.

"It's all politics right now," he said.

Other options are to go ahead with the June 30 turnover as planned, whatever the fallout, or to accelerate it by handing over power to the Iraqi Governing Council in March or April, he said.

Knight Ridder Newspapers correspondents Tom Lasseter in Najaf, Iraq, and Joseph L. Galloway and John Walcott in Washington contributed to this report.


http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0122-01.htm

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/03/08...tion=cnn_latest

Alleged CIA flights landed in UK
2 U.S. planes made 14 flights; opposition suspects 'rendition'

LONDON, England (AP) -- The British government has said that private planes -- which the opposition believes were part of a CIA program to transfer terror suspects to countries where they could be tortured -- landed at military airfields.

Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram said in a written response to a parliamentary question that two U.S. planes made 14 flights, landing at three British military airfields -- Northolt, Briz Norton and Lyneham -- between October 2002 and May 2004.

The opposition Liberal Democrats suspect the aircraft were part of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program, in which terror suspects are transferred to countries in which torture is known to occur.

The planes had visited destinations including Tripoli, Libya; Islamabad, Pakistan; Amman, Jordan; Doha, Qatar; Marrakech, Morocco; Luqa, Malta; Shannon, Ireland; and Washington.

"Bit by bit the jigsaw becomes clearer. But it would be a lot easier if the government would simply ask the U.S. administration some straightforward questions," Michael Moore, the foreign affairs spokesman of the Liberal Democrats, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Moore demanded that the government reveal how many individuals had been subjected to rendition by the United States via Britain since 1998.

"Apart from Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq, how many other detention centers are operated by the USA or on its behalf, and how many people are at them?" Moore said.

"What assurances can be given that the interrogation techniques used do not amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, which is illegal under international law?"

In his response to the Liberal Democrats' parliamentary question from December, Ingram wrote it would cost the government too much to check the flight records of all British military airfields over several years.

"None of this information is at odds with the foreign secretary's statements on the subject," Ingram said in the letter.

On February 23, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said U.S. President George W. Bush's administration has never requested British air space or territory for CIA flights.

Straw said two such flights were approved during the administration of former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

"Some have suggested that these might have been rendition flights. The government is giving us as little information as it can get away with," Moore said.

"We're prepared to give Blair's government the benefit of the doubt on this issue, but we need to know the questions it has asked the Bush administration and the answers it received."

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

March 9, 2006
Justice Dept. Report Cites F.B.I. Violations
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, March 8 — The Federal Bureau of Investigation found apparent violations of its own wiretapping and other intelligence-gathering procedures more than 100 times in the last two years, and problems appear to have grown more frequent in some crucial respects, a Justice Department report released Wednesday said.

While some of these instances were considered technical glitches, the report, from the department's inspector general, characterized others as "significant," including wiretaps that were much broader in scope than approved by a court and others that were allowed to continue for weeks or sometimes months longer than was authorized.

In one instance, the F.B.I. received the full content of 181 telephone calls as part of an intelligence investigation, instead of merely the billing and toll records as authorized, the report found. In a handful of cases, it said, the bureau conducted physical searches that had not been properly authorized.

The inspector general's findings come at a time of fierce Congressional debate over the program of wiretapping without warrants that the National Security Agency has conducted. That program, approved by President Bush, is separate from the F.B.I. wiretaps reviewed in the report, and the inspector general's office concluded that it did not have the jurisdiction to review the legality or operations of the N.S.A. effort.

But, the report disclosed, the Justice Department has opened reviews into two other controversial counterterrorism tactics that the department has widely employed since the Sept. 11 attacks.

In one, the inspector general has begun looking into the F.B.I.'s use of administrative subpoenas, known as national security letters, to demand records and documents without warrants in terror investigations. Some critics maintain that the bureau has abused its subpoena powers to demand records in thousands of cases.

In the other, the Office of Professional Responsibility, a Justice Department unit that reviews ethics charges against department lawyers, has opened inquiries related to the detention of 21 people held as material witnesses in terror investigations.

As with the F.B.I.'s use of administrative subpoenas, civil rights advocates assert that the Justice Department has abused the material witness statute by holding suspects whom it may not have enough evidence to charge. The new ethics inquiries are reviewing accusations that department officials did not take some material witnesses to court within the required time, failed to tell them the basis for the arrest or held them without any attempt to obtain their testimony as supposed witnesses in terror investigations, the inspector general said Wednesday.

Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, characterized the report as "yet another vindication for those of us who have raised concerns about the administration's policies in the war on terror."

Mr. Conyers said that "despite the Bush administration's attempt to demonize critics of its antiterrorism policies as advancing phantom or trivial concerns, the report demonstrates that the independent Office of Inspector General has found that many of these policies indeed warrant full investigations."

For its part, the F.B.I. said in a statement that it had been quick to correct errors in intelligence-gathering procedures when they were discovered and that "there have been no examples by the F.B.I. of willful disregard for the law or of court orders."

The inspector general's review grew out of documents, dealing with intelligence violations, that were released last year under a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a private group in Washington. The inspector general then obtained more documents on violations and included an 11-page analysis of the problem as part of a broader report Wednesday on counterterrorism measures.

The inspector general reviewed 108 instances in which the F.B.I. reported violations to an oversight board in the 2004 and 2005 fiscal years.

"We're always looking to bring the number of violations down," John Miller, chief spokesman for the bureau, said in an interview, "but given the scope and complexity of national security investigations, that's a relatively small number."

The inspector general's review found that reported violations under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs some federal wiretaps, accounted for a growing share of the total, having risen to 69 percent last year from 48 percent in 2004.

The duration of the violations also grew in some crucial areas, the review found. Two of those areas were the "overcollection" of intelligence — going beyond the scope approved by the court in authorizing a wiretap — and "overruns," in which a wiretap or other intelligence-gathering method was allowed to continue beyond the approved time period without an extension.

The review found that the average amount of time that overcollections and overruns were allowed before they were discovered and corrected rose to 32 days last year from 22 in 2004. In most cases, the F.B.I. was found to be at fault, while about a quarter of the time a "third party," usually a telecommunications company, was to blame, the data showed.

In taking issue with some of the findings, F.B.I. officials said the data were skewed by a number of exceptionally long violations; one wiretap lasted 373 days.



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March 9, 2006
Editorial
The Death of the Intelligence Panel
The wrenching debate in the 1970's over the abuse of presidential power produced two groundbreaking reforms aimed at preventing a president from using war or broader claims of national security to trample Americans' rights.

One was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which struck the proper balance between national security and bedrock civil liberties, and the other was the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a symbol of bipartisan leadership. They endured for a quarter of a century — until George W. Bush and Dick Cheney left FISA in tatters and the Senate Select Committee on its deathbed in just five years.

The Senate panel has become so paralyzingly partisan that it could not even manage to do its basic job this week and look into President Bush's warrantless spying on Americans' international e-mail and phone calls. Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman, said Tuesday that there would be no investigation. Instead, the committee's Republicans voted to create a subcommittee that is supposed to get reports from the White House on any future warrantless surveillance.

It's breathtakingly cynical. Faced with a president who is almost certainly breaking the law, the Senate sets up a panel to watch him do it and calls that control. This new Senate plan is being presented as a way to increase the supervision of intelligence gathering while giving the spies needed flexibility. But it does no such thing.

The Republicans' idea of supervision involves saying the White House should get a warrant for spying whenever possible. Currently a warrant is needed, period. And that's the right law. The White House has not offered a scrap of evidence that it interferes with antiterrorist operations. Mr. Bush simply decided the law did not apply to him.

It was no surprise that Mr. Roberts led this retreat. He's been blocking an investigation into the domestic spying operation for weeks, just as he has been stonewalling a promised investigation into how the White House hyped the intelligence on Iraq. But it was disappointing to see a principled Republican like Senator Olympia Snowe go along. The Democrats are not blameless, either. Too often, their positions seem like campaign tactics, and Senator John Rockefeller IV fumbled by not consulting Ms. Snowe, who is up for re-election and under intense White House pressure.

But the Republicans deserve the lion's share of the blame. It was Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney who hyped the intelligence on Iraq — and the Senate Republicans who helped them evade accountability. And it was Mr. Bush who approved the warrantless wiretapping, which is part of Mr. Cheney's crusade to expand presidential powers. (Unlike the rest of us, Mr. Cheney thought the lesson of Watergate was that the president was not strong enough.)

Ms. Snowe said she would still support an investigation if the new panel uncovered more wrongdoing. But that's hardly likely to happen because the Republicans on the panel are Mr. Roberts, Orrin Hatch, Mike DeWine and Christopher Bond, who march in lock step with the White House.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is still looking into the wiretapping. That committee should have plenty of incentive to go forward — its chairman, Senator Arlen Specter, was righteously angry when he received a letter in which Attorney General Alberto Gonzales implied that there was more warrantless spying we don't know about. Mr. Gonzales won't even say that Mr. Bush understands it is blatantly illegal to spy on communications within the United States without a warrant. Nevertheless, there's not much cause for hope: Mr. Specter has a sad habit of bowing to the right wing when the chips are down.

There are moments when leaders simply have to take a stand. It seems to us that one of them is when Americans are in danger of the kind of unchecked surveillance that they thought had died with J. Edgar Hoover, Watergate and spying on Vietnam protesters and civil rights leaders.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML

http://www.counterpunch.org/

Karmilowicz's Story
Ex-State Department Security Officer Charges Pre-9/11 Cover-Up
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

A former State Department security officer has given CounterPunch a detailed memoir and documents that point to very curious conduct by the CIA, Secret Service and FBI in the Philippines following warnings of an assassination bid on President Clinton during his November 12/13, 1994 visit to Manila.

The bid was organized by the 1993 WTC bomber Ramzi Yousef, at the direction of, and with financial support from, Osama bin Laden (who was indicted for the plot by a federal grand jury in August 1998).

A Pakistani linked to that Manila plot, and also to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency may still be at large. The security officer charges a U.S. cover-up of possible involvement by the Pakistani ISI in the 9/11/01 attack on the Trade Towers. Although given these same leads, the Official 9/11 Commission failed to investigate them.

This past December, Sam Karmilowicz finished a 21-year career as an officer in the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Back in 1994 he was working as an Assistant Regional Security Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Manila, when John D. Negroponte was the ambassador. These days, Negroponte is the U.S. Director of National Intelligence.

On the morning of September 18, 1994, Karmilowicz recalls, "the U.S. embassy received a telephone call from an anonymous person (who spoke with a distinct middle eastern accent) concerning his knowledge of an assassination plot against President William Clinton, who was scheduled to visit Manila that coming November."

The embassy switchboard relayed that and a subsequent call to Karmilowicz, and the caller provided him the name of a Pakistani businessman, Tariq Javed Rana, as being one of the leaders of the plot. The source told Karmilowicz that Rana was facilitating the importation of explosives and operatives into the Philippines to complete the mission by paying bribes to Philippine government officials of the Immigration and Customs bureaus. He said the bribes were paid in counterfeit U.S. currency.

The first call was promptly reviewed in the embassy that same day by members of the embassy emergency action committee (EAC) chaired by Raymond Burghardt, the Deputy in Charge of Mission under Negroponte. The FBI, Secret Service, CIA, DEA, and DIA were all members of the committee. At the conclusion of the EAC meeting, embassy law enforcement and intelligence officials were instructed to inform the Philippine authorities and to initiate an investigation to determine the credibility of the threat. (Burghardt went on to become US ambassador to Vietnam and now heads the East-West Center, based in Honolulu.)

"A few weeks afterwards", Karmilowicz says, " high ranking officers of the CIA and Secret Service came into my office and informed me that they had conducted an investigation concerning the threat and concluded that the allegations against the Pakistani, Rana, were a hoax in order to have the police harass him. They offered no motive or information as to why such a 'hoax' would be perpetrated or who might be behind it.

"While all this was going on, I was supervising and managing the embassy's surveillance detection unit responsible for the security of our housing compounds and annexes, including looking for suspicious persons or activity. I was also assigned the task of coordinating and providing protective security arrangements for visiting dignitaries and VIPs. As such, I had a professional responsibility to know whether the Pakistani suspect, and or any of his accomplices, was a credible threat against U.S. persons and/or interests in the Philippines. "The U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies may have dismissed this intelligence data as a hoax while secretly following up the leads ... or they may just have been incompetent and let the future 9-11 terrorist masterminds slip through their fingers. Either way, they seem to have been incompetent because, if they were secretly monitoring these suspected (later confirmed) terrorists, then they obviously did a poor job of it."

A few days before that first call, the Pakistani man named in the plot, Tariq Rana, had been featured in the Philippine press, which reported that he was a suspect in an illegal drug manufacturing ring. In response to these allegations, the public affairs section of the Pakistani embassy in Manila issued a number of statements vigorously denying the allegations against their national, claiming that he was a law-abiding citizen and a close relative of members of Pakistan's parliament and military establishment. Shortly after he issued these statements the Pakistani public affairs officer was recalled to Pakistan.

President Clinton arrived in Manila on November 12, 1994, and his two-day visit passed without incident. Then, one week before Pope John Paul II's visit to Manila in mid-January, 1995, police claimed a fire occurred in Room 603 of the Dona Josefa apartment building in Manila and that they discovered bomb-making chemicals and other evidence during a search of the apartment. Several people of Middle Eastern origin were staying in the apartment at the time of the fire and one of these persons was later identified as Ramzi Yousef, the 1993 World Trade Center bomber. Yousef is the nephew of Khaled Shaikh Muhammad, who was arrested in 2003. Muhammad subsequently disclosed under interrogation that he had planned the 9/11 attacks with Yousef in Manila at that time.

Ramzi Yousef fled the Philippines immediately after the apartment fire, and was arrested in Pakistan a month later. In 1998, Agence France Press (AFP) reported that Yousef confessed to federal authorities while in prison that he had in fact planned to assassinate Clinton when the president was visiting the Philippines but gave up because of tight security. Secret Service sources also report that large sums of counterfeit U.S. currency were entering the Philippines during the time of the plot. Clearly, the information passed to Karmilowicz was accurate and not a hoax as claimed by the CIA and Secret Service.

In conjunction with the fire at Yousef's apartment, the Philippine press also reported that a similar fire occurred at the business establishment of Tariq Rana. An article in the Manila Chronicle indicated that the police found the same chemicals in both fires - chemicals that are used to make nitroglycerin. Yousef used nitroglycerin to bomb Philippines Airlines Flight 434 on December 11, 1994 as a test run for the so-called "Bojinka"plot. The explosion tore out a two square foot portion of the fuselage and ripped almost in half the body of 24-year old Haruki Ikegami, a Japanese businessman occupying the seat under which the bomb was placed. The bomb used on Flight 434 had one-tenth the power of the bombs he planned to use in the first phase of his Bojinka project, which was to simultaneously bomb 11 American aircraft over the Pacific Ocean.

Rana was arrested in April 1995 by Philippine authorities and charged with business fraud, although his current whereabouts are unknown.

Not all the Al Qaeda operatives successfully escaped arrest following the January 6, 1995 fire at the Dona Josefa apartment building.

According to Peter Lance's book Cover Up, Ramzi Yousef instructed one of his accomplices, Abdul Hakim Murad, to return to Dona Josefa during the early morning hours on the day of the fire to retrieve his laptop computer, which contained all the details of the Bojinka plot, plus other incriminating information. The Philippine police, who had staked out the building, subsequently arrested Murad and transported him to Camp Crame, the headquarters of the Philippine National Police Intelligence Group (PNP). During the period of Murad's captivity, Lance says Murad "was harshly treated, perhaps even tortured, forced to ingest massive quantities of water".

Murad remained in Philippine custody until on or about May 11, 1995, when he was rendered to the U.S. to face criminal charges. However, before the rendition, the U.S. embassy sent Karmilowicz to Camp Crame to pick-up an envelope containing evidence that the PNP had collected from Murad. Upon his return to the embassy, Karmilowicz was instructed to transcribe the chain of evidence and to express mail the materials to a U.S. Justice Department Office in New York City. Mike Garcia and Dietrich Snell, the Assistant U.S. Attorneys who prosecuted Murad, almost certainly had access to the materials that Agent Karmilowicz sent to the Justice Department, although it is unknown what, if anything, was done with the evidence.

Pakistan's ISI and, indirectly, the CIA had much closer ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda than the American public was allowed to know. It is common knowledge that Osama bin Laden may be hiding in the rugged Pakistani mountains bordering Afghanistan. However, most Americans probably are not aware or do not remember that major al Qaeda players Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaik Mohammed were both hiding in Pakistan when they were captured in 1995 and 2003, respectively, as was Mir Aimal Kasi, the assassin who attacked CIA employees in their cars outside CIA headquarters in Langley, VA in 1993.

Pakistan had been playing a double game until the events of September 11 forced the situation. Pakistan had supported the rise of the Taliban in the power vacuum left by the departure of the Soviet occupation army at the end of the 1980s. Pakistan supported and even used al Qaeda terrorist training camps to train its own operatives for use in the Kashmir dispute. There are other examples of Pakistan's possible links to terrorism and infiltration of the ISI by al Qaeda, such as the alleged funneling of money from ISI director General Ahmad Mehmoud to 9/11's Mohammed Atta. The Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped and murdered in Karachi, Pakistan while he was investigating these al Qaeda-ISI links.

Karmilowicz went on from his tour of duty on Manila to Washington, then Beirut, and a later posting in Quito, Ecuador, where he was involved in a fracas which resulted in the death of an Ecuadorian national. Exonerated after a State Department investigation he served in Washington, finally leaving the service at the end of 2005.

During the spring of 2004, Karmilowicz says, "I contacted Maria Ressa, the CNN Jakarta Bureau Chief after I read a book that she published in December 2003 entitled Seeds of Terror. According to her research, the Pakistani suspected of plotting to kill President Clinton was a close associate of Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed during the time that these persons were hatching the plot to use airline carriers as missiles to attack the U.S." Ressa also told Karmilowicz that her sources in the Philippine intelligence and police bureaus suspected that this Pakistani was an associate of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency. The story has often been told of how a smoky accident in Yousef's apartment happened to draw police attention, and though Yousef escaped, his laptop provided disclosed that this attacks were nearly ready for execution.

The story is true as far as it goes, she told Karmilowicz, but the Philippine authorities were not quite so asleep at the wheel. The explosion aboard Philippine Airlines flight 434 had placed the police on heightened alert with the pope's visit just a few weeks away. Yousef had called the Associated Press, claiming that Abu Sayyaf was responsible, which suggests Filipino suspects, but Avelino "Sonny" Razon of the Presidential Security Group (PSG) tasked with security for the pope's visit was tipped to watch for Middle Easterners. "The PNP (Philippine National Police), particularly the PSG ,was on heightened alert because in December 1994, we received reports that a group of Middle Eastern personalities would be coming over to the Philippines to assassinate the Pope," Razon said. "The PSG had one man in particular under surveillance -- Tareq Javed Rana, a Pakistani suspected of supporting international terrorists with drug money. They were on the right track. He was a close associate of Ramzi Yousef. While under surveillance, Rana's house in Paranque, a suburb of Manila, burned down. An official police report would later say the PSG believed the "conflagration was caused by combustible chemicals such as those used for making an improvised explosive device [IED]."

Ressa's book suggested that the PNP did not begin its surveillance of Rana until December 1994, several months after the U.S. embassy had alerted the Philippine authorities that Rana was named as a suspect to assassinate President Clinton. This raises the question: why wasn't Rana investigated earlier; or, if he was investigated, why do certain people now want to deny this?

In 2004, Karmilowicz and his attorney contacted Richard Ben-Veniste of the official 9/11 Commission, suggesting that the leads from 1994 about Rana pointed to possible ISI complicity and that these leads be followed up. But the Commission never called him to testify.

These days, Karmilowicz (living in Alexandria, VA, and seeking a security job in a Fortune 500 firm), is scathing about the conduct of the interagency taskforce in the U.S. embassy in Manila.

What I think this story reveals is that the 9-11 Commission and the U.S. government deliberately withheld information from the U.S. public (and everyone else for that matter) that linked Al Qaeda operatives to persons who had close ties to Pakistani government officials, including members of Pakistan's ISI. One can only guess whether that was to save embarrassment or to hide illegal conduct.

One thing is for certain, i.e., the FBI, Secret Service, and CIA have deceived, and continue to deceive, the public concerning Rana's connection to Al Qaeda and the facts regarding the 9-11 attack.

One of the standouts in this spin of lies is Neil Herman, a former FBI official who was involved in the Bojinka investigation and a former supervisor of the FBI's Joint Terrorist Task Force in New York. Herman was quoted in an August 5, 2004 New York Times article entitled, Qaeda Strategy is Called Cause for New Alarm by Eric Lipton and Benjamin Weiser, which reported:

Even though the large-scale jetliner attack over the Pacific never happened, it is clear that the elaborate planning was an unappreciated warning of the sophistication and determination of the terrorists.

"It showed the government back in the mid-1990's how detail-oriented these individuals were," said Mr. Herman, the former FBI official, who was involved in the Bojinka investigation. "It also showed that there was an active network, although, of course, we were unable to determine the extent of the network back then."

Another prominent figure suspected of quashing the truth is Dietrich L. Snell, the Senior Counsel and Team Leader of the Official 9-11 Commission. Peter Lance writes extensively in his books Cover Up and 1000 Years for Revenge about Snell's shenanigans in cherry-picking evidence and excluding credible witness testimony, including information collected by the Defense Department's Able Danger Unit concerning pre-9/11 sightings of Mohammed Atta, one of the nineteen suspected hijackers. These allegations are now resurfacing in the news. The Associated Press (AP) reported on February 15, 2005 that U.S. Representative Curt Weldon, the vice Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee advised the public that the Able Danger Unit had identified Atta more than a dozen times before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Weldon also reportedly said the secret team found "a problem" in Yemen two weeks before the deadly Al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole in 2000, of which the ship commander was not told. Former (unidentified) members of the 9/11 Commission reportedly dismissed Weldon's findings.

My experience in the Philippines also appears to overlap Snell's involvement in the Murad case that Snell prosecuted. The Cooperative Research 9-11 Timeline (www.cooperativeresearch.org) contains a very peculiar account entitled: Early 1998:Prosecutors Turn Down Deal That Could Reveal Bojinka Third Plot.

The entry said: "Abdul Hakim Murad, a conspirator in the 1995 Bojinka plot with Ramzi Yousef, Khalid Shaik Mohammed, and others, was convicted in 1996 of his role in the Bojinka plot. He is about to be sentenced for that crime. He offers to cooperate with federal prosecutors in return for a reduction in his sentence, but prosecutors turn down his offer. Dietrich Snell, the prosecutor who convicted Murad, says after 9-11 that he doesn't remember any such offer. But court papers and others familiar with the case later confirmed that Murad does offer to cooperate at this time. Snell claimed he only remembers hearing that Murad had described an intention to hijack a plan and fly it into the CIA headquarters. However, in 1995 Murad had confessed to Philippine investigators that this would have been only one part of a larger plot to crash a number of airplanes into prominent U.S. buildings, including the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a plot that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed later adjusts and turns in the 9-11 plot. While Philippine investigators claim this information was passed on to U.S. intelligence, it's not clear just which U.S. officials may have learned this information and what they did with it, if anything. [New York Daily News, 9/25/01] Murad is sentenced in May 1998 and given life in prison plus 60 years. [Albany Times Union, 9/22/02] After 9-11, Snell goes on to become Senior Counsel and a team leader for the 9-11 Commission. Author Peter Lance later calls Snell "one of the fixers, hired early on to sanitize the Commission's final report." Lance says Snell ignored evidence presented to the Commission that shows direct ties between the Bojinka plot and 9-11, and in so doing covers up Snell's own role in the failure to make use of evidence learned from Murad and other Bojinka plotters. [FrontPage Magazine, 1/27/05].

I know who the intelligence officials were at the U.S. embassy at the time of Murad's arrest and interrogation. These are the same officials who discounted the threat information I received about Rana. Do these people have something to hide? You bet they do!

Peter Lance was entirely correct when he told CNN anchor Lou Dobbs in a December 5, 2005 interview that the 9-11 Commission was essentially "a whitewash" and that it intentionally limited its investigation to 1996-forward. He said the Commission moved the plot's origin "to 1996 from 1994"and in so doing omitted information that linked Mohammed Atta to the terrorists responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Lance said Congress should put Dietrich Snell under oath to find out why the 9-11 staffer prevented the Able Danger information from getting to the 9-11 Commission.

Clearly, the 9-11 Commission's decision to use 1996 as the date that the 9-11 plot originated was also designed to omit the information that I obtained concerning Tariq Rana, and the connection he had with the Al Qaeda operatives who conceived the 9-11 plot.

Given these revelations, how can the American public trust a government that has rationalized its own failure to protect this nation by implementing draconian measures (e.g. the Patriot Act, illegal wiretapping, and abductions and torture) - measures that have stripped its citizens of the rights and protections for which this country was founded. And what have these measures bought us but a seemingly endless war of attrition with an adversary that grows stronger and more lethal everyday.

Karmilowicz says, "my experience in the Philippines shows the U.S. government has compartmentalized information, not so much to protect sources and methods of an investigation or intelligence operation, but in order to cover-up its gross incompetence or its complicity in illegal and questionable activities conducted by, or against, foreign powers."

At some point, (most likely after President Clinton concluded his visit to the Philippines) the CIA and Secret Service realized that Rana and his associates were a threat after all, but they kept this information from Agent Karmilowicz.

Karmilowicz says, "Keeping that information to themselves is a breach of the no-double-standard policy [where one agency can't respond to a perceived threat without notifying the other agencies and the American public]."

And even worse, Karmilowicz believes, "this breach of policy has now become the norm in the post 9-11 world, whereby the State Department has now been co-opted by CIA and the Defense Department to allow people to be abducted and killed rather than apprehended. In one case I suspect that because information was compartmentalized, an attack may have been allowed to proceed ­ in Jeddah in December 2004, ­ and five people were killed." [See Counter Punch 'The Origins of the Rendition Program: Does the CIA Have the Right to Break Any Law, January 2006]. Karmilowicz likes to remind us how John Negroponte, the former Chief of Mission in the Philippines, who directed and approved the efforts of the various agencies at post, "was rewarded for his complicity in this cover-up, appointed the Director of National Intelligence, the person who approves secret renditions, eavesdropping, and the abduction and assassination of terrorist suspects".

Karmilowicz cites AP's Mathew Barakat and Peter Yost as reporting that Rob Spencer, the U.S. prosecutor in the Moussaoui trial in federal court in Alexandria, gave an opening statement to the jury in which he claimed that if Moussaoui had come clean -- i.e., informed the law enforcement establishment of his knowledge of the 9-11 plot -- in 2001, the FBI would have been able to use his records to locate 11 of the 19 September 11 hijackers, including all four pilots. Spencer also said the government would have kept those conspirators off airplanes and would have altered airport screeners to confiscate small knives and boxcutters. "Who in their right mind", Karmilowicz says, "would believe such a statement given what I observed and experienced in the Philippines?"

Sam Karmilowicz can be reached at skarmilo1@yahoo.com

The following article from Congressional Quarterly presents a picture of a somewhat disengaged John Negroponte and of a neutered Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Negroponte Makes the Most of His Post as Minister Without Portfolio
By Jeff Stein, CQ Staff

On many a workday lunchtime, the nominal boss of U.S. intelligence, John D. Negroponte, can be found at a private club in downtown Washington, getting a massage, taking a swim, and having lunch, followed by a good cigar and a perusal of the daily papers in the club’s library.

“He spends three hours there [every] Monday through Friday,” gripes a senior counterterrorism official, noting that the former ambassador has a security detail sitting outside all that time in chase cars. Others say they’ve seen the Director of National Intelligence at the University Club, a 100-year-old mansion-like redoubt of dark oak panels and high ceilings a few blocks from the White House, only “several” times a week.

Surely Negroponte needs a comfort zone, forced as he is to spends hours in the witness chair in front of congressional committees, fielding hot potatoes on subjects over which he has no control — the NSA’s warrantless surveillance, domestic spying by secret military intelligence units, paying newspapers in Iraq to run pro-U.S. stories.

Lacking control must be a new experience for Negroponte. In the 1980s he was ambassador to Honduras, base camp for U.S.-backed attacks on left-wing Nicaragua. More recently, he was the U.S. proconsul in Baghdad. Negroponte’s reputation as a very demanding boss, in fact, preceded him to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), where aides fretted at the prospect of 15-hour days and memos thrown back in their faces by this disciple of Henry A. Kissinger.

But there seems to be a new, relaxed John Negroponte. And some close observers think they know why. He’s figured out the job. Which is to say, he really doesn’t have much control over the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. So why not hang at the University Club? Negroponte spokesman Carl Kroft takes serious issue with that portrayal. “He’s the hardest working person in U.S. intelligence,” Kroft said. “He’s hard at work from the early hours of the morning to late every night. The job never ends.”

On the Hot Seat

“We appointed you to be the person to (run) all intelligence,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., lectured Negroponte at a Feb. 28 hearing of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. (CQ Transcripts: Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing, Feb. 28, 2006) Feinstein asked Negroponte about “recent media reports [that] have spotlighted a number of activities that appear to be related to intelligence collection or covert action, but that well may be outside of the official intelligence community’s channels. “For example,” Feinstein continued, “military databases of suspicious activity reports . . .by the (domestic military) counterintelligence field activity, or CIFA; and, secondly, a Pentagon program to secretly pay Iraqi newspapers to run pro-American articles.
“Were these activities subject to your approval and oversight?”

Negroponte’s answer was short-circuited by an unidentified voice, according to the CQ transcript, quite possibly his deputy, former Air Force general and NSA chief Michael Hayden. “Ma’am, I don’t believe that either of those activities would fall into Mr. Negroponte’s area. They are Department of Defense programs, I believe.” “Now, let me raise this problem then,” Feinstein continued. “Now, I know how tough it is. But if you didn’t know and you didn’t give a go-ahead [to domestic military spying], it indicates to me that, for 85 percent of the budget, which is defense-related, that you’re not going to have the controls that you should have,” Feinstein said. “You want to comment?”

Negroponte, who not long ago in Baghdad was dismissing senior military officers with the wave of his hand, had to be feeling an acute wave of heartburn. The Director of National Intelligence was forced to concede that the U.S. intelligence activities Feinstein was asking him about had “not risen to the level of my office.” In any event, they came “under the direction of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence” — a pipsqueak, relatively speaking. Negroponte said he “understood” that the Pentagon was doing an internal review of spying programs because of a congressional uproar. “But will you get the results of that review?” Feinstein asked.
“Yes,” promised Negroponte, dismissed like a schoolboy, “I will get those results.”

How Many Divisions?

Washington’s conventional wisdom these days is that ODNI is a joke. The main reason is that Negroponte’s group has little power over the Pentagon’s covert actions. It’s not his fault. Congress set it up that way after Rumsfeld and company worked the rooms of the House and Senate office buildings. The noted intelligence historian Lock K. Johnson worries that Negroponte could end up like the National Drug Czar, “with no real power” over U.S. spy agencies. Or the Pope, whose political powers Josef Stalin dismissed with a laugh to worried aides: “The Pope? How many divisions has he got?”

Kroft, Negroponte’s spokesman, said in an e-mailed response to a question that his boss “determines and presents to the President the full U.S. National Intelligence Program budget.” As for Negroponte’s lunches at the University Club, he responded, “As a matter of policy we do not discuss the Director of National Intelligence’s schedule.”

Backchannel Chatter

Fire when ready: Clark Kent Ervin, the former DHS Inspector General, is not going to make many friends — or maybe he will — with sentences like these from his forthcoming book, Open Target, an advance copy of which just arrived on SpyTalk’s desk: “From the very beginning, the Information Analysis (IA) unit of the Department of Homeland Security proved to be a bad, bad joke.” Ervin describes both understaffing and empty desks at DHS’s intelligence wing. Eventually, “word got around the tight-knit and hyper-status-conscious intelligence community that taking a job (there) was not” — his emphasis — “a career-enhancing move,” writes Ervin, a Texas protege of the Bush family. Wonder what President Bush thinks of that (our emphasis).

Landing more gently on the SpyTalk bookshelf recently: Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community: An Ethnographic Study, an inside look at the people who connect the dots, by anthropologist Dr. Rob Johnson. This is of more than passing interest because it is published by the CIA’s own Center for the Study of Intelligence. Political Terrorism: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Peter Lang Books), by the Canadian intelligence expert Jeffrey Ian Ross, ruminates on the the origins of terrorism or, put more simply, he asks: What does Osama bin Laden want?
Source: CQ Homeland Security
© 2006 Congressional Quarterly Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Judge Says Libby Can See Bush Briefings
By TONI LOCY, Associated Press Writer

A federal judge ordered the CIA on Friday to turn over highly classified intelligence briefings to Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide to use in the aide's defense against perjury charges.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton rejected CIA warnings that the nation's security would be imperiled if the presidential-level documents were disclosed to lawyers for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff.

The judge said the CIA can either delete highly classified information from the briefing material and provide copies of what Libby received six days a week, often with Cheney. Or, Walton said, the CIA can produce "topic overviews" of the matters covered in the briefings.

The judge also ordered the CIA to give Libby an index of the topics covered in follow-up questions that the former White House aide asked intelligence officers who conducted the briefings.

In seeking CIA input late last month, Walton appeared to have been trying to broker a compromise between defense attorneys and prosecutors to avoid a lengthy court battle with the Bush administration over the briefing material.

The judge's order indicates he is ready for such a fight. He set a schedule for the Bush administration to file any objections by March 24.

The charges against Libby — perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to FBI agents — grew out of an investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's identity.




Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


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Official: Iraq may still seek WMDs

BY TIMOTHY M. PHELPS
WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

March 10, 2006


WASHINGTON -- A former top CIA official said Thursday that despite the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Iraq is likely to be looking for weapons of mass destruction within the next five to 10 years.

Paul Pillar, who until last year was in charge of intelligence assessments for the Middle East, said the CIA warned the Bush administration before the Iraq invasion in 2003 that a change of regimes would not necessarily solve any WMD problem.

In a speech at the Middle East Institute here, Pillar said Iraqis live in "a dangerous neighborhood," with rival countries pursuing weapons of mass destruction. So the CIA had warned that a future Iraqi government would likely want the very weapons Hussein was (wrongly) suspected of hiding, including nuclear weapons, he said.

"Iraq may turn once again to ... a WMD program," Pillar, who is retired from the CIA, said Thursday. "And wouldn't that be ironic?"

Pillar recently published an article in Foreign Affairs magazine that for the first time fully laid out the CIA's side of the battle with the Bush administration over Iraq intelligence.

Pillar charges that the administration never sought strategic assessments from the CIA about Iraq. He said in his article that the Bush administration made its decision to go to war and then "cherry-picked" items from intelligence assessments in an effort to justify the decision to the public.

The biggest discrepancy between the CIA's intelligence and the administration's line on Iraq was the claim by Bush that there was a relationship between Hussein and al-Qaida, Pillar wrote. There was no intelligence supporting that theory, Pillar said, but the administration wanted to capitalize on "the country's militant post-9/11 mood," he wrote.

Pillar wrote that the intelligence community, on its own initiative, warned the administration before the war that there was a significant chance of violent conflict in Iraq and that the war would likely boost radical Islam throughout the Middle East.

In his speech, Pillar said Iraq is serving the same purpose that Afghanistan once did, as an inspiration and a base for radical Islam.

How the Central Intelligence Agency Played Dirty Tricks With Our Culture :

The C.I.A., it seems, was worried that the public might be too influenced by Orwell's pox-on-both-their-houses critique of the capitalist humans and Communist pigs. So after his death in 1950, agents were dispatched (by none other than E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy the film rights to "Animal Farm" from his widow to make its message more overtly anti-Communist.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12302.htm

Internet blows CIA cover:

When the Tribune searched a commercial online data service, the result was a virtual directory of more than 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of some two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United States.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews...cs/14076456.htm