Rolling Back Pentagon Spies

http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0309nj1.htm

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Rolling Back Pentagon Spies

By Shane Harris, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, March 9, 2007

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is considering a plan to curtail the Pentagon's clandestine spying activities, which were expanded by his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, after the 9/11 attacks. The undercover work allowed military personnel to collect intelligence about terrorists and to recruit spies in foreign countries independently of the CIA and without much congressional oversight.

Former military and intelligence officials, including those involved in an ongoing and largely informal debate about the military's forays into espionage, said that Gates, a former CIA director, is likely to "roll back" several of Rumsfeld's controversial initiatives. This could include changing the mission of the Pentagon's Strategic Support Branch, an intelligence-gathering unit comprising Special Forces, military linguists, and interrogators that Rumsfeld set up to report directly to him. The unit's teams work in many of the same countries where CIA case officers are trying to recruit spies, and the military and civilian sides have clashed as a result. CIA officers serving abroad have been roiled by what they see as the Pentagon's encroachment on their dominance in the world of human intelligence-gathering.

A former senior intelligence official who knows Gates said that the secretary wants to "dismantle" many of the intelligence programs launched by Rumsfeld and his top lieutenants, Stephen Cambone, the former undersecretary for intelligence, and Douglas Feith, who was Rumsfeld's policy chief. The former official added that the Defense Intelligence Agency, which has also expanded its human spying efforts, could be returned to a more analytical role.

The official noted that Gates doesn't intend to eliminate the Strategic Support Branch but said that its mandate will change. The unit arose from a written order by Rumsfeld to end the "near total dependence on CIA" for intelligence-gathering, and agency officials viewed it as a competitor.


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"The official noted that Gates doesn't intend to eliminate the Strategic Support Branch but said that its mandate will change."

This side of a world-wide spiritual revolution, national clandestine services are bound to remain. Heck if we have a job protecting ourselves against the predations of our own leaders - which is always a given, though not necessarily catastrophic in normal times - how much more essential is it for us to retain SOME kind of defensive, military capacity. Tiny, in the US, compared with the present one, and with a nationalised military-industrial complex, not driven by lethally avaricious monsters.

But the point I am making is that wars and national defence have a background, a necessary hinterland of intelligence and diplomacy. Consequently, the habit of our lying MSM to scoff at "conspiracy theories" is so ignorant it is too pathetic to be even laughable. Guess what! Clandestine services are called "clandestine services", because they are clandestine! What do you make of that, MSM? And what's more there's more than one person involved in them! How about THAT then! In other words, it is in the nature of our fallen world that every country has a regular standing corps of terrorist conspirators, a permanent, standing conspiracy, in varying states of activity, secretive and favouring surprising their victims, when they actually mean business. And, moreover, with which our respective, political heads of state and surrogates will interact, manifesty not always to the benefit of the common weal, particularly, given our corporatist regimes. When the clandestine services are on quasi-legitimate state business, though, it is difficult to see how policing them could be a practicable proposition.

However, certainly in the case of the US (and I strongly suspect in the UK), the use of clandestine services seems to have been massively abused by individuals or cabals either in furtherance of private vendettas or of party political and/or imperial goals. So, the only practicable way of controlling our national destinies free of pernicious, abusive distortions arising from the machinations of the clandestine agencies, is to enable the honest leaders, concerned with the welfare of all citizens, to govern our countries. Ironically and astonishingly, I read the other day, that there are plans afoot in the UK, or at least being considered, to have our elections machine-operated!!!

I believe that there is still a remnant of toffs, old-money patricians in both our countries who have managed to some extent to hold at least some of the worst machinations of our respective, corporatist governments in check. But what is really neeeded, particularly in the US, is honest elections, i.e wholesale removal of the machines and a return to paper ballots counted by hand in full public view. Obviously, it will also be of paramount importance for our media, TV and press, to cease peddling "infotainment" instead of the most significant news of the day.

Of course, all the other benefits of a "New Deal" presidency, such as a gradual return to full, duly remunerative employment and genuine educational opportunities for all, can only contribute further to a wiser electorate, and ensure that the clandestine services work for the people as a whole, for the general public.