Washington Post
Rumsfeld gets vast espionage power
Sun Jan 23, 2005 19:06
64.140.158.50
Deseret Morning News, Sunday, January 23, 2005
Rumsfeld gets vast espionage powers
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post
http://deseretnews.com/dn/print/1,1442,600106744,00.html
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA's historic bailiwick,
has created a new espionage arm and is reinterpreting U.S. law to give
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine
operations abroad, according to interviews with participants and documents
obtained by The Washington Post.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, with troops on a surprise visit to Iraq
in December 2004, is being given broad authority over clandestine
operations abroad with the creation of the Strategic Support Branch.
Nick Wadhams, Associated Press
The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support
Branch, arose from Rumsfeld's written order to end his "near total
dependence on CIA" for what is known as human intelligence.
Designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary's
direct control, the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case
officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside
newly empowered special operations forces.
Military and civilian participants said in interviews that the new unit
has been operating in secret for two years - in Iraq, Afghanistan and other
places they declined to name. According to an early planning memorandum to
Rumsfeld from Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
the focus of the intelligence initiative is on "emerging target countries
such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, Philippines and Georgia." Myers and his
staff declined to be interviewed.
The Strategic Support Branch was created to provide Rumsfeld with
independent tools for the "full spectrum of humint operations," according
to an internal account of its origin and mission. Human intelligence
operations, a term used in counterpoint to technical means such as
satellite photography, range from interrogation of prisoners and scouting
of targets in wartime to the peacetime recruitment of foreign spies. A
recent Pentagon memo states that recruited agents may include "notorious
figures" whose links to the U.S. government would be embarrassing if
disclosed.
Perhaps the most significant shift is the Defense Department's bid to
conduct surreptitious missions, in friendly and unfriendly states, when
conventional war is a distant or unlikely prospect - activities that have
traditionally been the province of the CIA's Directorate of Operations.
Senior Rumsfeld advisers said those missions are central to what they
called the department's predominant role in combating terrorist threats.
The Pentagon has a vast bureaucracy devoted to gathering and analyzing
intelligence, often in concert with the CIA, and news reports over more
than a year have described Rumsfeld's drive for more and better human
intelligence. But the creation of the espionage branch, the scope of its
clandestine operations and the breadth of Rumsfeld's asserted legal
authority have not been detailed publicly before. Two longtime members of
the House Intelligence Committee, a Democrat and a Republican, said they
knew no details before being interviewed for this article.
Pentagon officials said they established the Strategic Support Branch
using "reprogrammed" funds, without explicit congressional authority or
appropriation. Defense intelligence missions, they said, are subject to
less stringent congressional oversight than comparable operations by the
CIA.
Rumsfeld's dissatisfaction with the CIA's operations directorate, and his
determination to build what amounts in some respects to a rival service,
follows struggles with then-CIA Director George Tenet over intelligence
collection priorities in Afghanistan and Iraq. Pentagon officials said the
CIA naturally has interests that differ from those of military commanders,
but they also criticized its operations directorate as understaffed,
slow-moving and risk-averse. A recurring phrase in internal Pentagon
documents is the requirement for a human intelligence branch "directly
responsive to tasking from SecDef," or Rumsfeld.
The new unit's performance in the field - and its latest commander,
reserve Army Col. George Waldroup - are controversial among those involved
in the closely held program. Pentagon officials acknowledged that Waldroup
and many of those brought quickly into his service lack the experience and
training typical of intelligence officers and special operators.
In his civilian career as a federal manager, according to a Justice
Department inspector general's report, Waldroup was at the center of a 1996
probe into alleged deception of Congress concerning staffing problems at
Miami International Airport. Navy Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, director of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, expressed "utmost confidence in Colonel
Waldroup's capabilities" and said that Waldroup's unit has scored "a whole
series of successes" that he could not reveal in public.
He acknowledged the risks, however, of trying to expand human intelligence
too fast: "It's not something you quickly constitute as a capability. It's
going to take years to do."
Rumsfeld's ambitious plans rely principally on the Tampa-based U.S.
Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, and on its clandestine component, the
Joint Special Operations Command. Rumsfeld has designated SOCOM's leader,
Army Gen. Bryan Brown, as the military commander in chief in the war on
terrorism. He has also given Brown's subordinates new authority to pay
foreign agents.
The Strategic Support Branch is intended to add missing capabilities -
such as the skill to establish local spy networks and the technology for
direct access to national intelligence databases - to the military's much
larger special operations squadrons. Some Pentagon officials refer to the
combined units as the "secret army of Northern Virginia."
Known as "special mission units," Brown's elite forces are not
acknowledged publicly. They include two squadrons of an Army unit popularly
known as Delta Force, another Army squadron - formerly code-named Gray Fox
- that specializes in close-in electronic surveillance, an Air Force human
intelligence unit and the Navy unit popularly known as SEAL Team Six.
The Defense Department is planning for further growth. Among the proposals
circulating are the establishment of a Pentagon-controlled espionage
school, largely duplicating the CIA's Field Tradecraft Course at Camp
Perry, Va., and of intelligence operations commands for every region
overseas.
Rumsfeld's efforts, launched in October 2001, address two widely shared
goals. One is to give combat forces, such as those fighting the insurgency
in Iraq, more and better information about their immediate enemy. The other
is to find new tools to penetrate and destroy the shadowy organizations,
such as al-Qaida, that pose global threats to U.S. interests in conflicts
with little resemblance to conventional war.
In pursuit of those aims, Rumsfeld is laying claim to greater independence
of action as Congress seeks to subordinate the 15 U.S. intelligence
departments and agencies - most under Rumsfeld's control - to the newly
created and still unfilled position of national intelligence director. For
months, Rumsfeld opposed the intelligence reorganization bill that created
the position. He withdrew his objections late last year after House
Republican leaders inserted language that he interprets as preserving much
of the department's autonomy.
Lt. Gen. William Boykin, deputy undersecretary for intelligence,
acknowledged that Rumsfeld intends to direct some missions previously
undertaken by the CIA. He added that it is wrong to make "an assumption
that what the secretary is trying to say is, 'Get the CIA out of this
business, and we'll take it.' I don't interpret it that way at all."
"The secretary actually has more responsibility to collect intelligence
for the national foreign intelligence program . . . than does the CIA
director," Boykin said. "That's why you hear all this information being
published about the secretary having 80 percent of the (intelligence)
budget. Well, yeah, but he has 80 percent of the responsibility for
collection, as well."
CIA spokeswoman Anya Guilsher said the agency would grant no interviews
for this article.
Pentagon officials emphasized their intention to remain accountable to
Congress, but they also asserted that defense intelligence missions are
subject to fewer legal constraints than Rumsfeld's predecessors believed.
That assertion involves new interpretations of Title 10 of the U.S. Code,
which governs the armed services, and Title 50, which governs, among other
things, foreign intelligence.
======================
VO: In private, the neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz were furious. Not just because Saddam Hussein had been left in power, but because they saw this as a clear expression of the corrupt liberal values that dominated America—a moral relativism that was prepared to compromise with the forces of evil in the world.
HOLMES : Wolfowitz’ anger is fundamentally an anger against the weakness of American liberalism: the compromising nature of a man like George Bush senior. His willingness to make concessions, to negotiate, not to drive to the bitter end. And his anger is motivated, interestingly, less by hatred of Saddam Hussein, than by hatred of American liberals, who are a source of weakness, and a source of rot, and a source of relativism, that had been corroding American society for decades.
VO: Faced by this defeat, the neoconservative movement now turned inwards, to try and defeat the forces of liberalism that were holding it back. And to do this, they turned again to the theories of Leo Strauss. Strauss believed that good politicians should reassert the absolute moral values that would unite society, and this would overcome the moral relativism that liberalism created. One of the most influential Straussians was the new assistant to the Vice-President, William Kristol.
WILLIAM KRISTOL , Chief of Staff to the Vice President, 1988-92: For Strauss, liberalism produced a decent way of life, and one that he thought was worth defending, but a dead end where nothing could be said to be true; one had no guidance on how to live, everything was relative. Strauss suggests that maybe we didn’t just have to sit there and accept that that was our fate. Politics could help shape the way people live, that politics could help shape the way that people live, teach them some good lessons about living decent and noble human lives. And can we think about what cultures, and what politics, what social orders produce more admirable human beings? I mean, that whole question was put back on the table by Strauss, I think.
VO: The neoconservatives set out to reform America. And at the heart of their project was the political use of religion. Together with their long-term allies, the religious right, they began a campaign to bring moral and religious issues back into the center of conservative politics. It became known as the “culture wars.”
[ TITLE : Christian Coalition commercial ]
VO (on commercial) : Your tax dollars are being used to sponsor obscene and pornographic displays.
PAT ROBERTSON : I don’t like Jesus Christ, who is my Lord and Savior, being dumped in a vat of urine by a homosexual, and then have my money to pay for it! I think that’s obscene.
ROBERTSON : Satan, be gone! Out from this [unintelligible]! C’mon!
VO: For the religious right, this campaign was a genuine attempt to renew the religious basis of American society. But for the neoconservatives, religion was a myth, like the myth of America as a unique nation that they had promoted in the Cold War. Strauss had taught that these myths were necessary to give ordinary people meaning and purpose, and so ensure a stable society.
TV COMMERCIAL MOM : Do you ever worry that they’re playing too much Nintendo?
MOM 2 : Oh, not anymore. See, Matt has Bible Adventures. They’re actually learning Bible stories while they’re playing Nintendo.
MICHAEL LIND , Journalist and former neoconservative: For the neoconservatives, religion is an instrument of promoting morality. Religion becomes what Plato called a “noble lie.” It is a myth which is told to the majority of the society by the philosophical �lite in order to ensure social order.
ANNOUNCER ON CHRISTIAN FITNESS COMMERCIAL : What better way to enjoy God’s creation than a Praise Walk?
[ TITLE : INTEGRITY MUSIC FITNESS ]
LIND : In being a kind of secretive �litist approach, Straussianism does resemble Marxism. These ex-Marxists, or in some cases ex-liberal Straussians, could see themselves as a kind of Leninist group, you know, who have this covert vision which they want to use to effect change in history, while concealing parts of it from people incapable of understanding it.
VO: Out of this campaign, a new and powerful moral agenda began to take over the Republican Party. It reached a dramatic climax at the Republican Convention in 1992, when the religious right seized control of the party’s policy-making machinery. George Bush became committed to running for President with policies that would ban abortion, gay rights, and multiculturalism. Speakers who tried to promote the traditional conservative values of individual freedom were booed off the stage.
WILLIAM WELD , Republican Governor of Massachusetts : I happen to think that individual freedom should extend to a woman’s right to choose.
CONVENTION DELEGATES : (whistles and boos)
WELD : I want the government out of your pocketbook and your bedroom!
VO: For the neoconservatives, the aim of this new morality was to unite the nation. But in fact, it had completely the opposite effect. Mainstream Republican voters were frightened away by the harsh moralism that had taken over their party. They turned instead to Bill Clinton, a politician who connected with their real concerns and needs, like tax and the state of the economy.
DIANE BLAIR , Clinton Campaign : In the week after the Republican Convention, Republican moderates, young people, and particularly women saying, “I’ve been sort of torn between the two parties, but where do I sign up to help Clinton get elected? I am frightened by this ultraconservative agenda that I hear coming out of Houston.”
BOB MATERA : I’ve been a lifelong Republican. I’m a registered Republican. I am voting for Bill Clinton this time. Enough is enough. It is time for a change.
VO: At the end of 1992, Bill Clinton won a dramatic victory. But the neoconservatives were determined to regain power. And to do this, they were going to do to Bill Clinton what they had done to the Soviet Union: they would transform the President of the United States into a fantasy enemy, an image of evil that would make people realize the truth of the liberal corruption of America.
[ TITLE : ALGERIA 1992 / June 1992 ]
http://207.44.245.159/video1038.htm
Rumsfeld gets vast espionage powers
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post
http://deseretnews.com/dn/print/1,1442,600106744,00.html
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA's historic bailiwick,
has created a new espionage arm and is reinterpreting U.S. law to give
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine
operations abroad, according to interviews with participants and documents
obtained by The Washington Post.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, with troops on a surprise visit to Iraq
in December 2004, is being given broad authority over clandestine
operations abroad with the creation of the Strategic Support Branch.
Nick Wadhams, Associated Press
The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support
Branch, arose from Rumsfeld's written order to end his "near total
dependence on CIA" for what is known as human intelligence.
Designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary's
direct control, the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case
officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside
newly empowered special operations forces.
Military and civilian participants said in interviews that the new unit
has been operating in secret for two years - in Iraq, Afghanistan and other
places they declined to name. According to an early planning memorandum to
Rumsfeld from Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
the focus of the intelligence initiative is on "emerging target countries
such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, Philippines and Georgia." Myers and his
staff declined to be interviewed.
The Strategic Support Branch was created to provide Rumsfeld with
independent tools for the "full spectrum of humint operations," according
to an internal account of its origin and mission. Human intelligence
operations, a term used in counterpoint to technical means such as
satellite photography, range from interrogation of prisoners and scouting
of targets in wartime to the peacetime recruitment of foreign spies. A
recent Pentagon memo states that recruited agents may include "notorious
figures" whose links to the U.S. government would be embarrassing if
disclosed.
Perhaps the most significant shift is the Defense Department's bid to
conduct surreptitious missions, in friendly and unfriendly states, when
conventional war is a distant or unlikely prospect - activities that have
traditionally been the province of the CIA's Directorate of Operations.
Senior Rumsfeld advisers said those missions are central to what they
called the department's predominant role in combating terrorist threats.
The Pentagon has a vast bureaucracy devoted to gathering and analyzing
intelligence, often in concert with the CIA, and news reports over more
than a year have described Rumsfeld's drive for more and better human
intelligence. But the creation of the espionage branch, the scope of its
clandestine operations and the breadth of Rumsfeld's asserted legal
authority have not been detailed publicly before. Two longtime members of
the House Intelligence Committee, a Democrat and a Republican, said they
knew no details before being interviewed for this article.
Pentagon officials said they established the Strategic Support Branch
using "reprogrammed" funds, without explicit congressional authority or
appropriation. Defense intelligence missions, they said, are subject to
less stringent congressional oversight than comparable operations by the
CIA.
Rumsfeld's dissatisfaction with the CIA's operations directorate, and his
determination to build what amounts in some respects to a rival service,
follows struggles with then-CIA Director George Tenet over intelligence
collection priorities in Afghanistan and Iraq. Pentagon officials said the
CIA naturally has interests that differ from those of military commanders,
but they also criticized its operations directorate as understaffed,
slow-moving and risk-averse. A recurring phrase in internal Pentagon
documents is the requirement for a human intelligence branch "directly
responsive to tasking from SecDef," or Rumsfeld.
The new unit's performance in the field - and its latest commander,
reserve Army Col. George Waldroup - are controversial among those involved
in the closely held program. Pentagon officials acknowledged that Waldroup
and many of those brought quickly into his service lack the experience and
training typical of intelligence officers and special operators.
In his civilian career as a federal manager, according to a Justice
Department inspector general's report, Waldroup was at the center of a 1996
probe into alleged deception of Congress concerning staffing problems at
Miami International Airport. Navy Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, director of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, expressed "utmost confidence in Colonel
Waldroup's capabilities" and said that Waldroup's unit has scored "a whole
series of successes" that he could not reveal in public.
He acknowledged the risks, however, of trying to expand human intelligence
too fast: "It's not something you quickly constitute as a capability. It's
going to take years to do."
Rumsfeld's ambitious plans rely principally on the Tampa-based U.S.
Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, and on its clandestine component, the
Joint Special Operations Command. Rumsfeld has designated SOCOM's leader,
Army Gen. Bryan Brown, as the military commander in chief in the war on
terrorism. He has also given Brown's subordinates new authority to pay
foreign agents.
The Strategic Support Branch is intended to add missing capabilities -
such as the skill to establish local spy networks and the technology for
direct access to national intelligence databases - to the military's much
larger special operations squadrons. Some Pentagon officials refer to the
combined units as the "secret army of Northern Virginia."
Known as "special mission units," Brown's elite forces are not
acknowledged publicly. They include two squadrons of an Army unit popularly
known as Delta Force, another Army squadron - formerly code-named Gray Fox
- that specializes in close-in electronic surveillance, an Air Force human
intelligence unit and the Navy unit popularly known as SEAL Team Six.
The Defense Department is planning for further growth. Among the proposals
circulating are the establishment of a Pentagon-controlled espionage
school, largely duplicating the CIA's Field Tradecraft Course at Camp
Perry, Va., and of intelligence operations commands for every region
overseas.
Rumsfeld's efforts, launched in October 2001, address two widely shared
goals. One is to give combat forces, such as those fighting the insurgency
in Iraq, more and better information about their immediate enemy. The other
is to find new tools to penetrate and destroy the shadowy organizations,
such as al-Qaida, that pose global threats to U.S. interests in conflicts
with little resemblance to conventional war.
In pursuit of those aims, Rumsfeld is laying claim to greater independence
of action as Congress seeks to subordinate the 15 U.S. intelligence
departments and agencies - most under Rumsfeld's control - to the newly
created and still unfilled position of national intelligence director. For
months, Rumsfeld opposed the intelligence reorganization bill that created
the position. He withdrew his objections late last year after House
Republican leaders inserted language that he interprets as preserving much
of the department's autonomy.
Lt. Gen. William Boykin, deputy undersecretary for intelligence,
acknowledged that Rumsfeld intends to direct some missions previously
undertaken by the CIA. He added that it is wrong to make "an assumption
that what the secretary is trying to say is, 'Get the CIA out of this
business, and we'll take it.' I don't interpret it that way at all."
"The secretary actually has more responsibility to collect intelligence
for the national foreign intelligence program . . . than does the CIA
director," Boykin said. "That's why you hear all this information being
published about the secretary having 80 percent of the (intelligence)
budget. Well, yeah, but he has 80 percent of the responsibility for
collection, as well."
CIA spokeswoman Anya Guilsher said the agency would grant no interviews
for this article.
Pentagon officials emphasized their intention to remain accountable to
Congress, but they also asserted that defense intelligence missions are
subject to fewer legal constraints than Rumsfeld's predecessors believed.
That assertion involves new interpretations of Title 10 of the U.S. Code,
which governs the armed services, and Title 50, which governs, among other
things, foreign intelligence.
======================
VO: In private, the neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz were furious. Not just because Saddam Hussein had been left in power, but because they saw this as a clear expression of the corrupt liberal values that dominated America—a moral relativism that was prepared to compromise with the forces of evil in the world.
HOLMES : Wolfowitz’ anger is fundamentally an anger against the weakness of American liberalism: the compromising nature of a man like George Bush senior. His willingness to make concessions, to negotiate, not to drive to the bitter end. And his anger is motivated, interestingly, less by hatred of Saddam Hussein, than by hatred of American liberals, who are a source of weakness, and a source of rot, and a source of relativism, that had been corroding American society for decades.
VO: Faced by this defeat, the neoconservative movement now turned inwards, to try and defeat the forces of liberalism that were holding it back. And to do this, they turned again to the theories of Leo Strauss. Strauss believed that good politicians should reassert the absolute moral values that would unite society, and this would overcome the moral relativism that liberalism created. One of the most influential Straussians was the new assistant to the Vice-President, William Kristol.
WILLIAM KRISTOL , Chief of Staff to the Vice President, 1988-92: For Strauss, liberalism produced a decent way of life, and one that he thought was worth defending, but a dead end where nothing could be said to be true; one had no guidance on how to live, everything was relative. Strauss suggests that maybe we didn’t just have to sit there and accept that that was our fate. Politics could help shape the way people live, that politics could help shape the way that people live, teach them some good lessons about living decent and noble human lives. And can we think about what cultures, and what politics, what social orders produce more admirable human beings? I mean, that whole question was put back on the table by Strauss, I think.
VO: The neoconservatives set out to reform America. And at the heart of their project was the political use of religion. Together with their long-term allies, the religious right, they began a campaign to bring moral and religious issues back into the center of conservative politics. It became known as the “culture wars.”
[ TITLE : Christian Coalition commercial ]
VO (on commercial) : Your tax dollars are being used to sponsor obscene and pornographic displays.
PAT ROBERTSON : I don’t like Jesus Christ, who is my Lord and Savior, being dumped in a vat of urine by a homosexual, and then have my money to pay for it! I think that’s obscene.
ROBERTSON : Satan, be gone! Out from this [unintelligible]! C’mon!
VO: For the religious right, this campaign was a genuine attempt to renew the religious basis of American society. But for the neoconservatives, religion was a myth, like the myth of America as a unique nation that they had promoted in the Cold War. Strauss had taught that these myths were necessary to give ordinary people meaning and purpose, and so ensure a stable society.
TV COMMERCIAL MOM : Do you ever worry that they’re playing too much Nintendo?
MOM 2 : Oh, not anymore. See, Matt has Bible Adventures. They’re actually learning Bible stories while they’re playing Nintendo.
MICHAEL LIND , Journalist and former neoconservative: For the neoconservatives, religion is an instrument of promoting morality. Religion becomes what Plato called a “noble lie.” It is a myth which is told to the majority of the society by the philosophical �lite in order to ensure social order.
ANNOUNCER ON CHRISTIAN FITNESS COMMERCIAL : What better way to enjoy God’s creation than a Praise Walk?
[ TITLE : INTEGRITY MUSIC FITNESS ]
LIND : In being a kind of secretive �litist approach, Straussianism does resemble Marxism. These ex-Marxists, or in some cases ex-liberal Straussians, could see themselves as a kind of Leninist group, you know, who have this covert vision which they want to use to effect change in history, while concealing parts of it from people incapable of understanding it.
VO: Out of this campaign, a new and powerful moral agenda began to take over the Republican Party. It reached a dramatic climax at the Republican Convention in 1992, when the religious right seized control of the party’s policy-making machinery. George Bush became committed to running for President with policies that would ban abortion, gay rights, and multiculturalism. Speakers who tried to promote the traditional conservative values of individual freedom were booed off the stage.
WILLIAM WELD , Republican Governor of Massachusetts : I happen to think that individual freedom should extend to a woman’s right to choose.
CONVENTION DELEGATES : (whistles and boos)
WELD : I want the government out of your pocketbook and your bedroom!
VO: For the neoconservatives, the aim of this new morality was to unite the nation. But in fact, it had completely the opposite effect. Mainstream Republican voters were frightened away by the harsh moralism that had taken over their party. They turned instead to Bill Clinton, a politician who connected with their real concerns and needs, like tax and the state of the economy.
DIANE BLAIR , Clinton Campaign : In the week after the Republican Convention, Republican moderates, young people, and particularly women saying, “I’ve been sort of torn between the two parties, but where do I sign up to help Clinton get elected? I am frightened by this ultraconservative agenda that I hear coming out of Houston.”
BOB MATERA : I’ve been a lifelong Republican. I’m a registered Republican. I am voting for Bill Clinton this time. Enough is enough. It is time for a change.
VO: At the end of 1992, Bill Clinton won a dramatic victory. But the neoconservatives were determined to regain power. And to do this, they were going to do to Bill Clinton what they had done to the Soviet Union: they would transform the President of the United States into a fantasy enemy, an image of evil that would make people realize the truth of the liberal corruption of America.
[ TITLE : ALGERIA 1992 / June 1992 ]
http://207.44.245.159/video1038.htm
Message Board by American Patriot Friends Network [APFN]
