Idema role: rogue or U.S. agent?
Through his lawyer in the United States, Idema denies abusing the prisoners. He maintains that his work was approved by officials at the highest levels of the Department of Defense. He has identified his contact as a Pentagon official named Heather Anderson, whose existence was initially discounted in Associated Press reports because she was not listed in Pentagon directories.
But Anderson does exist; she works in the office of Stephen Cambone, who was named to the new position of undersecretary of defense for intelligence in March 2003. The office was created by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to oversee spy operations. Anderson did not return a telephone call to her office.
That story became the basis of at least two Soldier of Fortune articles in the 1990s, which portrayed Idema as a superpatriot, loose cannon and martyr. He blames his current predicament in Afghanistan on the same vendetta, suggesting that FBI officials set him up.
snip
That story became the basis of at least two Soldier of Fortune articles in the 1990s, which portrayed Idema as a superpatriot, loose cannon and martyr. He blames his current predicament in Afghanistan on the same vendetta, suggesting that FBI officials set him up
"There's a lot one may not like about Keith Idema," Tiffany, his attorney, said, "but there's a helluva lot more to like about him. Is he strong-willed? Yes. Is he opinionated? Yes. Is he sometimes his own worst enemy? Absolutely. But he is not a weekend warrior who woke up in his living room one day and went to Afghanistan."
more
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1514203p-7681163... Accused torturers claim Pentagon support
The Americans didn't testify. But Idema said afterward that the abuse allegations were invented. He also said he was in regular phone and e-mail contact with Pentagon officials "at the highest level".
Speaking to reporters crowding round the dock, Idema named a Pentagon official who allegedly asked the group to go "under contract" - an offer they refused.
"The American authorities absolutely condoned what we did. They absolutely supported what we did," he said.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/07/22/1090464788... Idema named a Pentagon official
An interview with Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence
http://www.defenselink.mil/usdi/camboneinterview.html Stephen A. Cambone
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Steven_A._... Anderson works for Cambone
Lawmakers lash out at security clearance backlog
It is the Pentagon's policy to hire contractors to relieve the security clearance backlog, according to Heather Anderson, the acting director of security for the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. She said Defense officials were concerned about hiring federal investigators and then having too many staffers on hand when the backlog was reduced.
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0504/050604d1.htm The Department must have an affiliation with a private citizen before processing them for a personnel security clearance. For employees of DoD contractors, that relationship is established through the execution of a DoD Security Agreement, which is made a part of the contract with the company. Once the company has executed this agreement and is cleared, the company may process current employees or consultants for a background investigation if their duties will require access to classified information.
Approximately 85% of industry applicants are issued an interim clearance. For example, of the 152,059 requests for investigation from industry during FY03, approximately 85% of them were issued an interim clearance. An interim SECRET clearance authorizes access to SECRET information and most contractor employees can perform some functions with access to SECRET information, even if they ultimately require access to information of a higher level.
http://reform.house.gov/UploadedFiles/DOD%20-%20Anderso... OUTSOURCING WAR CRIMES
SAN DIEGO--It was late fall 2001, and the U.S. conquest of Afghanistan was nearly complete. A passel of foreign war correspondents milled about the lobby of the Hotel Tajikistan, waiting for the Tajik foreign ministry to issue permission papers we needed to pass the checkpoints between Dushanbe and the Afghan border, so we could go on to cover the siege of Kunduz. I popped into the Soviet-vintage hotel's business center to check my email. That's when I met Jonathan Keith "Jack" Idema, the former Special Forces soldier charged on July 5 along with two other Americans for kidnapping and torturing Afghans as part of an unauthorized, vigilante anti-Taliban operation run out of a private home in Kabul.
"U.S. citizen Jonathan K. Idema has allegedly represented himself as an American government and/or military official," the U.S. military said in a statement. "The public should be aware that Idema does not represent the American government and we do not employ him."
That's their current story, anyway.
Agents of the National Security Directorate, Afghanistan's new intelligence agency, say they found eight starved Afghan detainees--three of them hanging by their feet--in Idema's rented house in central Kabul, along with a few AK-47 rifles and blood-soaked clothes. None of Idema's prisoners were working against the Karzai regime, so the NSD plans to release them. Idema, say officials, was probably hoping to torture his victims into telling him the location of Osama bin Laden so he could collect a $25 million bounty.
Idema was nice at first, chatting me up with jittery intensity as he alternately identified himself as belonging to--or, more accurately, implying identification with--the CIA and U.S. Special Forces. Griping about a Pentagon ban against supplying Northern Alliance forces with medical supplies, Idema slipped me a computer disc containing photos of gruesome wounds that had gone untreated because of the inhumane policy. He asked me to pitch a piece on the subject to my editors at The Village Voice, but with a caveat: "Don't publish those photos before talking to me first." I promised that I wouldn't. "If you do," he added, "you will die in great pain." He went on at length about the special shadowy brotherhood of Green Berets past and present, and described how anyone who crossed them would be marked for death. I would never have broken my pledge, but I didn't need a story that badly. I soon left for Afghanistan; so, eventually, did Idema.
Jack Idema, reportedly retired from the Special Forces in 1992, fought alongside the Northern Alliance in 2001. He had enough money to buy goods and services at inflated war zone prices, not to mention references in the U.S. military--and a lot of chutzpah.
Beginning in Afghanistan and now in Iraq, the Bush Administration has assigned jobs previously carried out by the traditional uniformed military to private contractors, covert intelligence officers and retired commandos. The idea is "plausible deniability"; should a character like Idema go too far, the government disavows his crimes as the acts of a renegade. Only Idema and the Pentagon will ever know the truth about his status.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=127&nci... Dr. Cambone Briefing On The Office Of Programs Analysis And Evaluation
Cambone: Upgrading tanks or fighting vehicles or something like that beyond a certain number. I mean, there will be a certain number required, but where you would've done it to the next new set of -- I don't know -- hundred or thousand or whatever it is -- we don't do that second set. The first set is probably the kind of thing you want to do.
Next slide sort of lays that out. I mean, we did in the QDR -- you've seen this slide before -- ask that we have forces that are able to do all of the missions associated with the strategy, rather than, as we had in the past, said we wanted forces for two MTWs. All the rest we did was included in that. So once you had your five divisions for each contingency; once you had your five aircraft carriers; once you had your -- I forget what the numbers were on airplane squadrons -- we were done. And then if you had to go to Haiti, you just took forces out of one MTW pod or the other, and you sent them.
http://www.dod.mil/transcripts/2002/t09182002_t918camb.... Sounds like Idema works for Stephen Cambone at DOD
So this story goes to the highest levels of the Pentagon. Idema wasn't just some freelancer, he was a major player for a long time. No wonder Rummie is spending more and more time in his hidey hole.
------------------
Who is Stephen Cambone?
by Peter Ogden
July 20, 2004
The release of the 9/11 Commission report this week Who is Stephen Cambone?
The release of the 9/11 Commission report this week ? and the recent release of the Senate report on intelligence ? are at last providing a clearer picture of the flaws in our system of gathering intelligence. And as the use of intelligence by the Bush administration in the run-up to 9/11 comes under increased scrutiny, we are also learning a great deal about the people behind its collection, interpretation, and dissemination.
A name that we have not frequently heard mentioned, however, is Stephen Cambone. As the nation's first ever undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Cambone wields vast power within the intelligence community; yet, his only qualifications for the post are a fierce loyalty to Donald Rumsfeld and an unshakeable right wing ideology.
The position of undersecretary of defense for intelligence is the newest senior Defense Department position, and its establishment fundamentally alters the structure of the intelligence community as a whole. Devised by Donald Rumsfeld, it places all of the Pentagon's formerly independent intelligence units ? the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, each of the armed services' intelligence divisions, and others ? under the auspices of a single official.
Though without operational authority per se, the undersecretary ? or defense intelligence czar, as the position is known ? wields tremendous power though his mandate to set the intelligence-gathering agenda and oversee budget allocation. According to a memo circulated by Paul Wolfowitz in May, 2003, the OUSD - I will "provide oversight and policy guidance for all DoD intelligence activities? provide policy oversight for all the intelligence organizations within DoD."
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF... "We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of this great nation." GW Bush
Printer Friendly | | Top
UpInArms (1000+ posts) Mon Aug-09-04 07:28 AM
Response to Original message
3. Cambone is one nasty piece of work
and is tied to the abuse and torture of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.
Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.”
<snip>
One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he had little experience in running intelligence programs, though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States. He was known instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. “Remember Henry II—‘Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” the senior C.I.A. official said to me, with a laugh, last week. “Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much.”
Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld’s disdain for the analysis and assessments proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.’s inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambone’s military assistant, Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, was also controversial. Last fall, he generated unwanted headlines after it was reported that, in a speech at an Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with Satan.
...more...
UIA
original thread for broken links
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=737677By Gretchen Peters | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN - Making an already murky case murkier yet, three Americans accused of torturing Afghans in a private jail went on trial Wednesday insisting their counterterrorism mission had support from the Pentagon.
The US military has denied any ties to Jonathan K. Idema, who was arrested along with Brett Bennett and Edward Caraballo on July 5 when Afghan security forces raided the Kabul compound where they held eight prisoners.
American and Afghan authorities say the men posed as US Special Forces, duping both Afghan officials and soldiers with Kabul's NATO-led security force to support their missions. Yet in a lengthy pretrial statement to the media, Mr. Idema claimed he was working with the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, a relatively new position established by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the lead-up to the Iraq war.
At his trial, set to resume in about two weeks, Idema said he would produce recordings of phone conversations, e-mail records, and faxes to prove his claims. He named Heather Anderson, the acting director of security for Stephen Cambone, the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, as his main point of contact.
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:2-FzhtKTnxoJ:www.csmonitor.com/2004/0722/p06s01-wosc.htm++Stephen+Cambone+idema&hl=enThough initially there was little public awareness of the consequences of Rumsfeld's decision to create a defense intelligence czar , and of giving it to someone like Cambone , it only took one year and a stack of photographs of prisoners being tortured at Abu Ghraib to put both in the spotlight.
Cambone has since conceded that he was personally behind sending Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller to Iraq with orders to find more effective ways of interrogating prisoners. However, he flatly rejects the finding in Maj. Gen. Taguba's now infamous report that military intelligence was put in charge of military police at Abu Ghraib , a finding that would suggest that the orders for prisoner treatment were coming from higher up in the intelligence chain of command.
Cambone's performance before the Senate Armed Services Committee last May , at which he did little more than deny, evade, and equivocate , has also been found wanting.
When Sen. John Warner asked Cambone if his office had "overall responsibility for policy concerning the handling of detainees," Cambone coyly responded with, "Not precisely, sir." And when Cambone was pressed on the question of whether he and Rumsfeld believed that the prisoners in Iraq were protected by the Geneva Convention, he again ran for shelter beyond the word "precise":
Sen. Levin: You this morning said, again, the Geneva Convention applies to our activities in Iraq, but not precisely.
Mr. Cambone: No, sir. I think what the secretary , I , let me tell you what the facts are. The Geneva Convention applies in Iraq.
Sen Levin: Precisely?
Mr. Cambone. Precisely.
Sen. Levin: (Inaudible)
Mr. Cambone: They do not apply in the precise way that the secretary was talking about.
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=124725More Prisoner Abuse Testimony to Come
A slew of Army generals will testify behind closed doors next week about the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.
Generals throughout the chain of command in Iraq last fall from Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who commanded the military police guards, to Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East will give their sworn testimony to Paul Bergrin, defense attorney for one of the seven MPs charged with abusing prisoners.
Bergrin’s client, Sgt. Javal 'Sean' Davis, 26, of New Jersey, has denied that he committed any crime. Rather, according to court papers, 'he was merely following the orders of high-level government officials, members of the military and other civilian federal contractors to obtain intelligence information.
One of the 'civilian federal contractors' Bergrin wants to question is John B. Israel, a 48-year-old Canyon Country man who worked as a prison translator during the period of abuse. An Army report identifies Israel as one of four military intelligence officers and contractors who were 'directly or indirectly responsible' for the abuse.
One of those four , Lt. Col. Steve Jordan, the No. 2 military intelligence officer at the prison at the time has decided to assert the military version of the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination, Bergrin said.
On June 21 the judge in Davis’ court-martial proceedings, Col. James L. Pohl, cleared the way for Bergrin to question generals in the chain of command. But he found insufficient cause to allow Bergrin to question Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other high-ranking Pentagon officials in Washington.
Bergrin believes he now has sufficient cause. He filed a motion Friday asking Pohl to reconsider on the basis of statements Karpinski made a week later to The Signal.
Specifically, Bergrin’s motion seeks to compel testimony from Rumsfeld and from Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary for intelligence.
The motion quotes Karpinski telling The Signal on June 29, I don’t know if it stops at Cambone, but I believe that he was orchestrating it, he was directing.
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:3Hhid9sbv50J:jakarta.indymedia.org/front.php3%3Farticle_id%3D2393%26group%3Dwebcast++Stephen+Cambone+idema&hl=enRumsfeld running his own intelligence service
The "Iraq Survey Group" is more than it seems
It's agreed that the White House needs more intelligence, but not this kind...
Major General Keith Dayton, U.S. Army, was director of the ISG, a 1400 person outfit headquartered in Baghdad with operations in Qatar, Kuwait and Washington, DC. Publicly, the ISG's mission is to search for Iraq’s nebulous weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), but a closer inspection of the ISG reveals that it is an intelligence tool of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. According to Rumsfeld’s favorite son, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, the ISG is a combat and intelligence unit that reports directly “into the Secretary of Defense with work product going to the Director of Central Intelligence.” According to Seymour Hersh, Cambone’s reputation is so bad that an active duty three-star general indicated that if the Pentagon was being overrun by the enemy, he’d use his last bullet on Cambone. The ISG and Dayton have been implicated in the shameful Abu Ghraib TortureGate scandal.
And with the ISG’s intelligence fusion operation located in Washington, DC, that means Rumsfeld’s hands are dirty. There is also a clear line that can be drawn between the ISG and Undersecretary for Plans and Policy Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans/Office of Northern Gulf Affairs (speculation has been that he is a dual USA-Israeli citizen like Dov Zakheim). Feith created the disinformation about Iraqi WMDs and the Rumsfeld/Cambone used torture as a tactic to elicit false confessions and exaggerated claims under extreme duress. It is a tactic that SS Commander Heinrich Himmler and Soviet KGB Chief Levrenti Beria practiced so well in Germany and the USSR, respectively. No one claims that the USA and Israel rise to the level of Nazi and Soviet torturers, but, it is too early to say.
Full article here
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:Iu-c5_-kpBEJ:www.stupidgit.com/politics/archives/POL20040709.htm++Stephen+Cambone+idema&hl=enOne Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he had little experience in running intelligence programs, though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States. He was known instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. “Remember Henry II—‘Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” the senior C.I.A. official said to me, with a laugh, last week. “Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much.”
Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld’s disdain for the analysis and assessments proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.’s inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambone’s military assistant, Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, was also controversial. Last fall, he generated unwanted headlines after it was reported that, in a speech at an Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with Satan.
Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all special-access programs that were relevant to the war on terror. Those programs, which had been viewed by many in the Pentagon as sacrosanct, were monitored by Kenneth deGraffenreid, who had experience in counter-intelligence programs. Cambone got control, and deGraffenreid subsequently left the Pentagon. Asked for comment on this story, a Pentagon spokesman said, “I will not discuss any covert programs; however, Dr. Cambone did not assume his position as the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence until March 7, 2003, and had no involvement in the decision-making process regarding interrogation procedures in Iraq or anywhere else.”
more
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
