-Caveat Lector- http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0117-11.htm
The Coming Wars What the Pentagon Can Now Do in Secret by Seymour Hersh George W. Bushs relection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that controlagainst the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorismduring his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as facilitators of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way. Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region. Bushs relection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of Americas support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagons civilian leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former high-level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second-guessing. This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone, the former high-level intelligence official told me. Next, were going to have the Iranian campaign. Weve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrahweve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism. Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is Rumsfeld who has directed its implementation and has absorbed much of the public criticism when things went wrongwhether it was prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib or lack of sufficient armor plating for G.I.s vehicles in Iraq. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for Rumsfelds dismissal, and he is not widely admired inside the military. Nonetheless, his reappointment as Defense Secretary was never in doubt. Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfelds responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagons control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia. The Presidents decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the booksfree from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) The Pentagon doesnt feel obligated to report any of this to Congress, the former high-level intelligence official said. They dont even call it covert opsits too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, its black reconnaissance. Theyre not even going to tell the cincsthe regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.) In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. Everyone is saying, You cant be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq, the former intelligence official told me. But they say, Weve got some lessons learnednot militarily, but how we did it politically. Were not going to rely on agency pissants. No loose ends, and thats why the C.I.A. is out of there. For more than a year, France, Germany, Britain, and other countries in the European Union have seen preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon as a race against timeand against the Bush Administration. They have been negotiating with the Iranian leadership to give up its nuclear-weapons ambitions in exchange for economic aid and trade benefits. Iran has agreed to temporarily halt its enrichment programs, which generate fuel for nuclear power plants but also could produce weapons-grade fissile material. (Iran claims that such facilities are legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or N.P.T., to which it is a signator, and that it has no intention of building a bomb.) But the goal of the current round of talks, which began in December in Brussels, is to persuade Tehran to go further, and dismantle its machinery. Iran insists, in return, that it needs to see some concrete benefits from the Europeansoil-production technology, heavy-industrial equipment, and perhaps even permission to purchase a fleet of Airbuses. (Iran has been denied access to technology and many goods owing to sanctions.) The Europeans have been urging the Bush Administration to join in these negotiations. The Administration has refused to do so. The civilian leadership in the Pentagon has argued that no diplomatic progress on the Iranian nuclear threat will take place unless there is a credible threat of military action. The neocons say negotiations are a bad deal, a senior official of the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) told me. And the only thing the Iranians understand is pressure. And that they also need to be whacked. The core problem is that Iran has successfully hidden the extent of its nuclear program, and its progress. Many Western intelligence agencies, including those of the United States, believe that Iran is at least three to five years away from a capability to independently produce nuclear warheadsalthough its work on a missile-delivery system is far more advanced. Iran is also widely believed by Western intelligence agencies and the I.A.E.A. to have serious technical problems with its weapons system, most notably in the production of the hexafluoride gas needed to fabricate nuclear warheads. A retired senior C.I.A. official, one of many who left the agency recently, told me that he was familiar with the assessments, and confirmed that Iran is known to be having major difficulties in its weapons work. He also acknowledged that the agencys timetable for a nuclear Iran matches the European estimatesassuming that Iran gets no outside help. The big wild card for us is that you dont know who is capable of filling in the missing parts for them, the recently retired official said. North Korea? Pakistan? We dont know what parts are missing. One Western diplomat told me that the Europeans believed they were in what he called a lose-lose position as long as the United States refuses to get involved. France, Germany, and the U.K. cannot succeed alone, and everybody knows it, the diplomat said. If the U.S. stays outside, we dont have enough leverage, and our effort will collapse. The alternative would be to go to the Security Council, but any resolution imposing sanctions would likely be vetoed by China or Russia, and then the United Nations will be blamed and the Americans will say, The only solution is to bomb. A European Ambassador noted that President Bush is scheduled to visit Europe in February, and that there has been public talk from the White House about improving the Presidents relationship with Americas E.U. allies. In that context, the Ambassador told me, Im puzzled by the fact t chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran. (After Osirak, Iran situated many of its nuclear sites in remote areas of the east, in an attempt to keep them out of striking range of other countries, especially Israel. Distance no longer lends such protection, however: Israel has acquired three submarines capable of launching cruise missiles and has equipped some of its aircraft with additional fuel tanks, putting Israeli F-16I fighters within the range of most Iranian targets.) They believe that about three-quarters of the potential targets can be destroyed from the air, and a quarter are too close to population centers, or buried too deep, to be targeted, the consultant said. Inevitably, he added, some suspicious sites need to be checked out by American or Israeli commando teamsin on-the-ground surveillancebefore being targeted. The Pentagons contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are also being updated. Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the militarys war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. Updating the plan makes sense, whether or not the Administration intends to act, because the geopolitics of the region have changed dramatically in the last three years. Previously, an American invasion force would have had to enter Iran by sea, by way of the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman; now troops could move in on the ground, from Afghanistan or Iraq. Commando units and other assets could be introduced through new bases in the Central Asian republics. It is possible that some of the American officials who talk about the need to eliminate Irans nuclear infrastructure are doing so as part of a propaganda campaign aimed at pressuring Iran to give up its weapons planning. If so, the signals are not always clear. President Bush, who after 9/11 famously depicted Iran as a member of the axis of evil, is now publicly emphasizing the need for diplomacy to run its course. We dont have much leverage with the Iranianalways careful not to use the armed forces in a covert action without a Presidential finding. The Bush Administration has taken a much more aggressive stance. In his conversation with me, Smith emphasized that he was unaware of the militarys current plans for expanding covert action. But he said, Congress has always worried that the Pentagon is going to get us involved in some military misadventure that nobody knows about. Under Rumsfelds new approach, I was told, U.S. military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists. This could potentially involve organizing and carrying out combat operations, or even terrorist activities. Some operations will likely take place in nations in which there is an American diplomatic mission, with an Ambassador and a C.I.A. station chief, the Pentagon consultant said. The Ambassador and the station chief would not necessarily have a need to know, under the Pentagons current interpretation of its reporting requirement. The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls action teams in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador? the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. We founded them and we financed them, he said. The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we arent going to tell Congress about it. A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagons commando capabilities, said, Were going to be riding with the bad boys. One of the rationales for such tactics was spelled out in a series of articles by John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Py ways the groups procedures laid the groundwork for the Iran-Contra scandal. Despite the controversy surrounding Yellow Fruit, the I.S.A. was kept intact as an undercover unit by the Army. But we put so many restrictions on it, the second Pentagon adviser said. In I.S.A., if you wanted to travel fifty miles you had to get a special order. And there were certain areas, such as Lebanon, where they could not go. The adviser acknowledged that the current operations are similar to those two decades earlier, with similar risksand, as he saw it, similar reasons for taking the risks. What drove them then, in terms of Yellow Fruit, was that they had no intelligence on Iran, the adviser told me. They had no knowledge of Tehran and no people on the ground who could prepare the battle space. Rumsfelds decision to revive this approach stemmed, once again, from a failure of intelligence in the Middle East, the adviser said. The Administration believed that the C.I.A. was unable, or unwilling, to provide the military with the information it needed to effectively challenge stateless terrorism. One of the big challenges was that we didnt have Huminthuman intelligencecollection capabilities in areas where terrorists existed, the adviser told me. Because the C.I.A. claimed to have such a hold on Humint, the way to get around them, rather than take them on, was to claim that the agency didnt do Humint to support Special Forces operations overseas. The C.I.A. fought it. Referring to Rumsfelds new authority for covert operations, the first Pentagon adviser told me, Its not empowering military intelligence. Its emasculating the C.I.A. A former senior C.I.A. officer depicted the agencys eclipse as predictable. For years, the agency bent over backward to integrate and cordinate with the Pentagon, the former officer said. We just caved and caved and got what we deserved. It is a fact of life today that the Pentagon is a five-hundred-pound gorilla and the C.I.A. director is a chimpanzee. There was pressure from the White House, too. A former C.I.A. clandestine-services officer told mee more support for the Administrations political position. Porter Goss, Tenets successor, engaged in what the recently retired C.I.A. official described as a political purge in the D.I. Among the targets were a few senior analysts who were known to write dissenting papers that had been forwarded to the White House. The recently retired C.I.A. official said, The White House carefully reviewed the political analyses of the D.I. so they could sort out the apostates from the true believers. Some senior analysts in the D.I. have turned in their resignationsquietly, and without revealing the extent of the disarray. The White House solidified its control over intelligence last month, when it forced last-minute changes in the intelligence-reform bill. The legislation, based substantially on recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, originally gave broad powers, including authority over intelligence spending, to a new national-intelligence director. (The Pentagon controls roughly eighty per cent of the intelligence budget.) A reform bill passed in the Senate by a vote of 96-2. Before the House voted, however, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld balked. The White House publicly supported the legislation, but House Speaker Dennis Hastert refused to bring a House version of the bill to the floor for a voteostensibly in defiance of the President, though it was widely understood in Congress that Hastert had been delegated to stall the bill. After intense White House and Pentagon lobbying, the legislation was rewritten. The bill that Congress approved sharply reduced the new directors power, in the name of permitting the Secretary of Defense to maintain his statutory responsibilities. Fred Kaplan, in the online magazine Slate, described the real issues behind Hasterts action, quoting a congressional aide who expressed amazement as White House lobbyists bashed the Senate bill and came up with all sorts of ludicrous reasons why it was unacceptable. Rummys plan was to get a compromise in the bill in which the Pentagon keeps its marbles and the C.I.A. loses theirs, the former high-level intt action that is not attributable, the ability to directly task national-intelligence assetsincluding the many intelligence satellites that constantly orbit the world. Rumsfeld will no longer have to refer anything through the governments intelligence wringer, the former official went on. The intelligence system was designed to put competing agencies in competition. Whats missing will be the dynamic tension that insures everyones prioritiesin the C.I.A., the D.O.D., the F.B.I., and even the Department of Homeland Securityare discussed. The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what hes doing so they can ask, Why are you doing this? or What are your priorities? Now he can keep all of the mattress mice out of it. Copyright CondNet 2005 www.ctrl.org DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substanceânot soap-boxingâplease! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'âwith its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright fraudsâis used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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