First Petraeus, now Top Pentagon Covert Operator Vickers under Investigation

[leveymg]

Last edited Tue Dec 18, 2012, 05:28 PM - Edit history (1)

McClatchy Newspapers reports that the top Pentagon covert operations chief, Michael G. Vickers, is under Justice Dept. investigation for alleged leaks of classified information used in the making of a film documentary about the SEAL Team Six operation that killed Osama bin Laden. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/12/17/177676/bin-laden-leak-is-referred-to.html



Vickers was under consideration to replace David Petraeus as CIA Director, who resigned following the Benghazi attack, after an FBI investigation of his extramarital affair was publicly revealed. The McClatchy dispatch states:

The Justice Department was sent the case involving Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers in September, but it so far has declined to launch a criminal prosecution, said two senior U.S. officials who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

The case involved a determination by investigators of the Pentagon’s inspector general’s office that Vickers provided to the makers of the film, Zero Dark Thirty, the restricted name of a U.S. Special Operations Command officer who helped plan the May 2, 2011, raid on bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan, one official said. The identities of special forces personnel can be classified in certain circumstances and making them public is against the law, according to experts.

Vickers, a former Army special forces operator and one-time CIA paramilitary officer, is the top intelligence adviser to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and oversees the Pentagon’s vast intelligence operations. He has been frequently mentioned as a candidate to replace retired Army Gen. David Petraeus as CIA director.

In view of a series of events following the spectacular blowback in September from US covert operations in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the timing of all this is at the least . . . uh, interesting.

Vickers was officially named USD-I on March 16, 2011 after being appointed that post in 2010. That's when we first see the breakout of civil war across MENA and covert US involvement in that. In Libya and Syria, almost simultaneously following calls for "Day of Rage" by exile groups in February, the Arab Spring turned deadly. See, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Libyan_civil_war_before_military_intervention ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Syrian_civil_war_%28January%E2%80%93April_2011%29 By mid-March, semi-covert US involvement aid was flowing to the opposition in Libya. That date coincides with the arrival in Benghazi of late Ambassador Chris Stevens and a group of "aides" who popped up aboard a Greek freighter in Libya to coordinate the US role leading the opposition.

Meanwhile, in Syria simultaneous events followed the same course. In July, right after being appointed CIA Director, Petraeus immediately flew to Turkey for a series of high-level meetings. According to the Turkish media, in March Petraeus had met in Ankara with the head of the Turkish national intelligence agency: http://www.businessturkeytoday.com/turkey-denies-petraeus-visit-aims-to-mend-ties-with-israel.html


(CIA Director pays unexpected visit to Turkey)

Petraeus arrived In İstanbul on Monday for talks with Turkish officials on the situation in Syria and the fight against the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

This was the second unannounced visit by the US spy chief to Turkey in the last six months. He spent two days in Ankara in March, meeting with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Turkish counterpart, National Intelligence Organization (MİT) Undersecretary Hakan Fidan, to discuss the deepening instability in Syria, their joint fight against terrorism and closer cooperation on pressing regional issues. His program is being kept secret for security reasons.

Petraeus' First Stop: Ankara

David Petraeus, who had been the commander of U.S. and NATO-led troops in Afghanistan, was appointed as the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and then he visited Turkey's capital Ankara. He held meetings with Chief of General Staff Gen. Isik Kosaner and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, and congratulated Turkey for the role it undertook in the region.

http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/?kn=8

Petraeus and Vickers Ejected in Turn of Mideast Policy?

Vickers' name has been floating around Washington for months. After languishing since January when it was revealed in the WSJ that Congressional Republicans started demanding an investigation, the matter was sent over to DOJ in September. Now, it looks like Vicker's has finally been shot down, or at least grounded. That follows the resignation of several generals who commanded US special operations in the region. It also comes on the the heels of the withdrawal of Susan Rice as presumptive Secretary of State. Rice was a leading regime change advocate within the Administration, and was widely reported to have antagonized the Russians, which in recent days the US is seeking to reactivate diplomatic talks toward a resolution of the crisis in Syria.

Mike Vickers is, of course, best known as the CIA mastermind of the arming of the Mujahaddin in Afghanistan with heavy weapons, including Stinger anti-air missiles, a role that was popularized in the film version of George Creel's “Charlie Wilson’s War”.


(Mike Vickers: "What else do they need?&quot

Many of the weapons Vickers introduced into Afghanistan in the 1980s were covertly supplied through Egypt and a global network of black market arms dealers, which are the same sources now feeding the Syrian opposition, again with Saudi and Gulf Arab funding and cooperation.

Most recently, the Senate grounded plans to vastly expand the role of USD-I and DIA HUMINT in roles previously taken by CIA and State Department counter-proliferation. The Defense Intelligence Agency had proposed to expand its own mission in these areas after the other agencies massively failed assignment to locate many of the 20,000 or so MANPADs – missiles similar to the Stinger -- looted by militias after the overthrow of Ghadaffi in Libya. Some of these missiles, that have been used to shoot down civilian airliners, have now appeared and are being used by Libyan Jihadis and others in the escalating Syria regime change. Does anyone else see a continuity in method and purpose here?

One also has to ask: does this tie together with the resignation of Petraeus and the forced departure of several top Generals involved with formulating strategy and running special operations in MENA and South Asia? Finally, what does it mean for US approach to civil wars in the region and tensions with Iran?

[Octafish]

1. Operation CHAOS gone global.

Instability enables the divide-and-conquer types to get busy counting their loot.

The allies of Petraeus seem to have torpedoed a rival clique within the Secret Gov.

Thank you for the heads-up on Mr. Vickers, leveymg. Do we have a chance, living in the nightmare scenario Sen. Frank Church warned us about?

Senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and John Tower (D-Texas) examine a weapon developed for a CIA assassination program.

Frank Church and the Abyss of Warrantless Wiretapping

John Nichols
The Nation
BLOG | Posted 04/26/2006 @ 12:00am

Thirty years ago, on April 26, 1976, the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, delivered its final report detailing the lawlessness of U.S. intelligence agencies and the need for Congress to reassert the Constitutional system of checks and balances to order to rein in the cloak-and-dagger excesses of the executive branch of the federal government.

The committee, mercifully referred to by the last name of its chair, U.S. Senator Frank Church, D-Idaho, produced fourteen reports on the formation of U.S. intelligence agencies, the manner in which they had and were continuing to operate, and the abuses of law and of power -- up to and including murder -- committed by these agencies in Chile, the Congo, Cuba, Vietnam and other nations that experienced the attention of U.S. authorities in the Cold War era.

The committee also made 96 recommendations for how to do that. Some of those recommendations, such as the committee's call for creation of a permanent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and for a ban on assassinations of foreign leaders, were implemented. But, as the current controversy over President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program illustrates, the potential abuses about which the Church Committee warned were not entirely -- nor even adequately -- thwarted.

It was not for lack of trying by Senator Church, one of the most courageous legislators in American history, and his colleagues on the committee. As Senator Church said when the committee completed its work: "The United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy. Means are important, as ends. Crisis makes it tempting to ignore the wise restraints that make men free. But each time we do so, each time the means we use are wrong, our inner strength, the strength which makes us free, is lessened."

SNIP...

Three decades after the Church Committee submitted its final report, President Bush admits to ordering the NSA to spy on the telephone conversations of Americans on American soil without obtaining warrants.

Most of Congress stands idly by.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=79968

Here's a most prescient quotation of the late Sen. Church, on the subject of using America's spying technology on the American people -- specifically outlawed in the legislation that established the CIA:

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology."

I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”



An "abyss." It must be an open secret, for it is plain that is precisely where our nation has fallen.

PS: DUers also may enjoy Tom Englehardt's recent essay, How the US Intelligence Community Came Out of the Shadows.

[bemildred]

2. Yeah, I think something is going on.

However it may be that foreign policy is changing (it is ...) and they need to get the holdovers and sleepers out of the way. One of the things one would have to do to get US foreign poilicy under control is bring the CIA under control.