Rumsfeld's Personal Spy Ring, Salon July 16, 2003

[madfloridian]

http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2003/07/16/intelligence/

SNIP...."Rumsfeld's personal spy ring
The defense secretary couldn't count on the CIA or the State Department to provide a pretext for war in Iraq. So he created a new agency that would tell him what he wanted to hear.

The Pentagon's innocuously named Office of Special Plans served as a unique, handpicked group of hawkish defense officials who worked outside regular intelligence channels. According to the Department of Defense, the group was first created in the aftermath of Sept. 11 to supplement the war on terrorism; it was designed to sift through all the intelligence on terrorist activity, and to focus particularly on various al-Qaida links. By last fall it was focusing almost exclusively on Iraq, and often leaking doomsday findings about Saddam's regime. Those controversial conclusions are now fueling the suspicion that the obscure agency, propelled by ideology, manipulated key findings in order to fit the White House's desire to wage war with Iraq....."

And much more in the article.

[madfloridian]

1. From 2002, Israel turns up the heat on Iran.

Ties to Iran on this new spy deal reminds one of how deep all this goes.

http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2002/01/28/mullahs/

SNIP..."Israel turns up the heat on Iran
Worried about a possible thaw between Washington and Iran, Sharon warns that the Islamic regime poses an urgent threat to Israel.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Aluf Benn

Jan. 28, 2002 | Last Sunday afternoon, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon met with the leaders of AIPAC, Washington's pro-Israel lobby. Sharon told his visitors that Israel would not interfere with American decisions on Iran, but that it was important to turn the attention of the Bush administration toward Iran. Sharon said that recent developments, including Israel's capture of a ship loaded with Iranian arms apparently destined for the Palestinian Authority, had made "dealing with the Iranian threat ... more urgent." AIPAC doesn't need much encouragement to act against Iran, though. It played a key role in the passage of the controversial 1996 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, which unilaterally imposes penalties on foreign companies that do more than $40 million in energy-related business with Iran, and successfully lobbied Congress last summer to extend the act by five more years, despite the administration's original reluctance.

Israeli leaders have recently begun an aggressive public campaign -- mostly aimed at Washington -- against Iran and the threat it poses to Israel. The military chief of staff, Gen. Shaul Mofaz, came to Washington this month to raise the issue with top administration officials. Shimon Peres, the foreign minister, ordered his ministry to prepare and distribute a "black book" that would expose Tehran's threats and deeds against Israel to the world community. Peres overruled his office professionals, who had recommended a quiet diplomatic campaign rather than an open one......"

[spotbird]

2. Does this explain why Rummy has been invisible lately?

And Powell is conspicuous in his absence at the RNC convention?

[in_cog_ni_to]

3. Was this the group that Cheney

hung around with at the Pentagon when he planted his ass there for months and months? Do you know? I would assume it is since he was trying to dig up any little piece of garbage on Iraq and wasn't getting it from the CIA. :shrug:

[Rose Siding]

4. Hersh on Israel in Iraq: Plan B

In July, 2003, two months after President Bush declared victory in Iraq, the war, far from winding down, reached a critical point. Israel, which had been among the war’s most enthusiastic supporters, began warning the Administration that the American-led occupation would face a heightened insurgency—a campaign of bombings and assassinations—later that summer. Israeli intelligence assets in Iraq were reporting that the insurgents had the support of Iranian intelligence operatives and other foreign fighters, who were crossing the unprotected border between Iran and Iraq at will. The Israelis urged the United States to seal the nine-hundred-mile-long border, at whatever cost.

The border stayed open, however. “The Administration wasn’t ignoring the Israeli intelligence about Iran,” Patrick Clawson, who is the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and has close ties to the White House, explained. “There’s no question that we took no steps last summer to close the border, but our attitude was that it was more useful for Iraqis to have contacts with ordinary Iranians coming across the border, and thousands were coming across every day—for instance, to make pilgrimages.” He added, “The questions we confronted were ‘Is the trade-off worth it? Do we want to isolate the Iraqis?’ Our answer was that as long as the Iranians were not picking up guns and shooting at us, it was worth the price.”

Clawson said, “The Israelis disagreed quite vigorously with us last summer. Their concern was very straightforward—that the Iranians would create social and charity organizations in Iraq and use them to recruit people who would engage in armed attacks against Americans.”
...
Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel’s view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. Israel feels particularly threatened by Iran, whose position in the region has been strengthened by the war. The Israeli operatives include members of the Mossad, Israel’s clandestine foreign-intelligence service, who work undercover in Kurdistan as businessmen and, in some cases, do not carry Israeli passports.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040628fa_fact

[madfloridian]

5. The border stayed open.

This is interesting:
"The border stayed open, however. “The Administration wasn’t ignoring the Israeli intelligence about Iran,” Patrick Clawson, who is the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and has close ties to the White House, explained. “There’s no question that we took no steps last summer to close the border, but our attitude was that it was more useful for Iraqis to have contacts with ordinary Iranians coming across the border, and thousands were coming across every day—for instance, to make pilgrimages."

[peekaloo]

6. kick

[madfloridian]

7. From Joe Conason, Nov. 2003, about Feith.

http://archive.salon.com/opinion/conason/2003/11/17/leaks/

A lot of stuff here about Plame and Iraq connections to Al Quaeda, already being questioned by him in November.

Nov. 17, 2003 | An "inaccurate" gusher from the neocon pipeline

Wading through constant leaks of classified material from the Bush administration, American intelligence officials must wonder whether the White House and the Pentagon can be trusted with anything more sensitive than a grocery list. First came the flaming of Valerie Plame last July; then the (possibly self-serving) Rumsfeld memo about the progress of the war on terror last month; and now, in the pages of the Weekly Standard, a sheaf of "top secret" documents concerning the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida.

That last item -- heavily promoted throughout the Murdoch media over the weekend -- is a memorandum annexed to an Oct. 27 letter sent by Douglas Feith, the Defense undersecretary for policy, to Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and Jay Rockefeller, D- W.Va., the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The senators had asked Feith, neocon bureaucrat and former business partner of Richard Perle, to provide source citations for his testimony on the subject last July 10.

Evidently the letter's classified appendix was leaked to the Weekly Standard, which promptly published excerpts from it under the headline "Case Closed." That definitive tone resounds in the first paragraph: "Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al-Qaida training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al-Qaida -- perhaps even for <9/11 hijacker> Mohamed Atta -- according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by the Weekly Standard."

Read that opening sentence again, after perusing the article that follows, and it is obvious that even the quotations selected by writer Stephen Hayes fail to prove such sweeping assertions. Instead, what the quotes suggest is that while al-Qaida and Iraqi intelligence may have had contacts dating back to the early '90s, the ties between Saddam's state apparatus and the bin Laden group were sporadic and murky. And there is no new evidence linking Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, as the president recently acknowledged. "

[starroute]

8. Israel has been taking aim at Iran for a while

I ran into some odd stuff while researching last week on the Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce thread. It didn't quite fit there, but maybe it belongs with this other Israel stuff. (Note that 1996 was the same year as Feith and Perle's paper, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.")

http://www.qsl.net/yb0rmi/vosa.htm

The Voice of Southern Azerbaijan (VOSA), active since 1996 with broadcasts against Iran from an undisclosed transmitting location, is quickly becoming an intriguing story. A story that not only includes oil and politics, but also espionage, the Mossad, and players from the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980's. When it was first heard, radio monitors assumed that it was broadcasting from Turkmenistan, however, an Israeli connection slowly came to light as more people tuned in. According to monitor Nikolai Pashkevich in Russia, "when I tuned in my receiver to this channel I found an open carrier with 'Reshet Bet'... on the background and then VOSA signing on" (CDX 180). Rashet Bet is, of course, a news service of Israel Radio.

<snip>

According to Wolfgang Bueschel in BCDX 351, "Mr. Vafa Culuzadeh, adviser of former Azerbaijan President Ebulfez Elicibey, told the Italian press agency IPS in October 1992 from Baku, that the Israelian secret service specialist David Kimche and... Richard Secord, who was involved in the Iran-Contra-Affair, visited Azerbaijan, (and) presented a delegation of more Israelian secret service personnel. Mr. Culuzadeh took part on a return visit to Israel, (and) lead a delegation of Azerbaijan/Uzbek/Kazakh secret services"

<snip>

David Kimche is a 30-year veteran of the Mossad and was an important force behind the Reagan administration's arms-for hostages swap with Iran and its secret aid to the Nicaraguan rebels (coined Iran-Contra.) In fact, it was Kimche who helped to organize the Contras, who supplied them with Israeli military advisers, who sold the US government Palestinian weapons Israel had seized in 1982, and who claimed he could get access to the hostage-takers in Lebanon.

<snip>

Retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord was also a key player during the Iran-Contra scandal. He earned his wings while flying for "Air America," the CIA covert paramilitary operation in Laos that supplied local Hmong tribes with arms and training to counter the Communist Laotian regime. He wrote a memoir, "Honored and Betrayed: Irangate, Covert Affairs, and the Secret War in Laos," in 1992 to detail his involvement with the CIA and service to the American government. He was one of the Iran-Contra players who set up the "Enterprise," the company outside of the CIA that earned money and lined the pockets for those involved.


(If anyone's interested, there's more on Secord's adventures in Azerbaijan at http://www.diacritica.com/sobaka/2003/shah.html. Like Iran-Contra, and like the OSP, this seem to have been another case of elements in the US government using unofficial operations to evade official US policies.)