Rumsfeld: Out of Control

Last week, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker a lengthy article outlining the Bush administration's plans for controlling the Middle East. One of his informants stated, "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, we're going to have the Iranian campaign. We've declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah-we've got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism." [see http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/011805A.shtml for the entire article.]

I have read no reaction in the corporate media (those "mainstream" organs that serve as the "news" source for about 90% of American--local papers, local news, network news) regarding a planned invasion of Iran. According to Hersh, this notion is following the same arc as the Iraq invasion--the target has been set apart from any real threat and the objective of "taking out" Iran as a Muslim theocratic state and replacing it with a pristine democracy (such as that emerging in Iraq?).

Now, we find that Rumsfeld has been increasing his "proprietary" hold on information by creating a super-secret and unsupervised spy agency within and funded by the Pentagon. THIS STUFF IS AMAZING AND I READ ABOUT IT ON PAGE 19 OF THE SACRAMENTO BEE!

Read Barton Gellman's article in the Washington Post [http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/012405Z.shtml

Rumsfeld apparently doesn't like having his style cramped by the CIA--these folks are too wishy washy for his taste; to slow, to analytical and too committed preserving life, I guess--so he's created the "Strategic Support Branch" as his own private spy agency. Doing this of course requires "reinterpretation" of the law so that it can simply be declared legal. (Why the appearance of legality is still a concern to this administration is a mystery to me; their motto is literally "rules are made to be broken.")

According to Gellman, "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."

Further, "the focus of the intelligence initiative is on "emerging target countries such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, Philippines and Georgia." Now add Iran.

Gellman goes on to say that "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." Apparently, not even Congress is trusted enough to be informed. That is truly amazing.

Let's see how much interest this raises. I predict that the story will die quickly since it will certainly be ignored by Fox, CNN and the local news. That's just depressing.



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