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Rumsfeld's Own Personal
CIA
ProgressiveTrail.org
by Kurt Nimmo
published by Another Day in the Empire
January 28, 2005
http://www.kurtnimmo.com/
Strategic Support Branch: Rumsfeld's Own Personal
CIA
One day the Pentagon vehemently denies it is covertly
operating inside Iran—or at least disputes particular
details, as outlined recently by Seymour Hersh—and the next
day Pentagon officials describe a new organization, the Strategic
Support Branch (SSB), designed "to operate without
detection and under the defense secretary's direct
control,' deploy "small teams of case officers,
linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside
newly empowered special operations forces,' and essentially
replace "the CIA's Directorate of Operations,'
according to the Washington Post.
Note: the CIA's Directorate of Operations was
responsible for covert action, in other words, secret wars.
"You have a target: a government that you don't
like,' writes John Stockwell, a former CIA agent.
"They send the CIA in with its resources and its activists:
hiring people, hiring agents to tear apart the social and
economic fabric of the country. It's a technique for
putting pressure on the government, hoping they can make the
government come to the U.S.'s terms, or that the government
will collapse altogether and they can engineer a coup
d'etat, and have the thing wind up with their own choice of
people in power.'
As the Post seems to be saying, Rumsfeld wants to cut the CIA
out of the loop and have the Pentagon take over the dirty
business of covertly targeting countries, minus any oversight or
accountability.
In short, Rumsfeld is in the process of creating his own
intelligence operation, not answerable to Congress or the
American people. "Two longtime members of the House
Intelligence Committee, a Democrat and a Republican, said they
knew no details before being interviewed for this article,'
notes the Post. "Pentagon officials said they established
the Strategic Support Branch using ‘reprogrammed'
funds, without explicit congressional authority or appropriation.
Defense intelligence missions, they said, are subject to less
stringent congressional oversight than comparable operations by
the CIA.'
As the Post explains, the SSB will cooperate with the Joint
Special Operations Command (JSOC), a clandestine unit run out of
the Tampa-based U.S. Special Operations Command. "Although
JSOC's stated purpose is to provide a unified command
structure for conducting joint special operations and exercises,
it is widely reported that JSOC is actually the command
responsible for conducting US counter-terrorism (CT)
operations,' writes GlobalSecurity.org. "These SMUs
[Special Missions Units] are tasked with conducting CT
operations, strike operations, reconnaissance in denied areas,
and special intelligence missions,' for instance in
Afghanistan, where "a unit called Task Force 11, composed
mostly of Delta Force soldiers and SEALs' are
"hunting for senior Taliban and al Qaeda members.' As
GlobalSecurity notes, JSOC units
have reportedly been involved in a number of covert military
operations over the last two decades. Some of these operations
include providing assistance to Italian authorities during their
search for kidnapped US Army Gen. James Dozier, participating in
Operation Urgent Fury; the US invasion of Grenada, planning a
rescue attempt of US hostages being held in Lebanon, rescuing
hostages being held aboard the cruise liner Achille Lauro,
participating in Operation Just Cause; the US intervention in
Panama, directing US Scud hunting efforts during Operation Desert
Storm, conducting operations in support of UN mandates in
Somalia, and searching for suspected war criminals in the former
Republic of Yugoslavia.
SSB and JSOC bring to mind another Rumsfeld pet
project—the Proactive Preemptive Operations Group, or P2OG.
In September, 2002, UPI reported details on a Defense Science
Board (DSB) report presented to Rumsfeld proposing "an
elite group of counter-terror operatives to make the war on
terrorism pre-emptive and proactive, duping al Qaida into
undertaking operations it is not prepared for and thereby
exposing its personnel. … Rather than simply trying to
find and foil terrorists' plans—the approach that
characterizes the current strategy—the "Proactive
Pre-emptive Operations Group' —known as
P2OG—would devise ways to stimulate terrorists into
responding or moving operations, possibly by stealing their money
or tricking them with fake communications, according to the
report.' The DSB report is interesting in light of
Hersh's recent revelations about what the Pentagon plans to
do in Iran. "The panel would also create a team of
specially trained special forces soldiers able to search out and
take offensive action against suspected nuclear, chemical or
biological weapons sites,' the UPI story reports.
Naturally, since P2OG will (or is) run out of the Pentagon, it
does not have to report to Congress or the American people.
"The proposal is the latest sign of a new assertiveness by
the Defense Department in intelligence matters, and an indication
that the cutting edge of intelligence reform is not to be found
in Congress but behind closed doors in the Pentagon,' wrote
the Federation of American Scientists in October, 2002.
P2OG is the perfect Strausscon tool. It would
"invigorate U.S. intelligence,' now run out of the
Pentagon, leaving the CIA in the dust, and develop "an
entirely new capability to proactively, preemptively evoke
responses from adversary/terrorist groups,' as the DSB
characterized it. In other words, it would "evoke'
the sort of "responses' from "terrorists'
ideal for establishing pretexts for "preemptively'
attacking nations on the Strausscon roster, namely Iran and
Syria. As "DSB Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint
Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism,' a PowerPoint
presentation delivered on August 16, 2002, notes, the "lead
responsibility' for P2OG falls on the shoulders of the
"SecDef,' in other words Rumsfeld.
"Operation Northwoods was such a scheme,' writes
Chris Floyd. "The US government is planning to use
‘cover and deception' and secret military operations
to provoke murderous terrorist attacks on innocent people. Such
operations are not new for the United States
authorities.'
It was a plan put forward by America's top military
brass in 1963 to justify the invasion of Cuba. It called for a
phony terrorist campaign complete with bombings, hijackings,
plane crashes and dead Americans to provide justification for an
invasion of Cuba. President John F. Kennedy rejected the plan
– and was assassinated a few months later.
Another similar provocation was a reported attack by
Vietnamese naval craft on the US navy in the Tonkin Gulf. It was
used by President Lyndon B. Johnson to escalate the invasion of
Vietnam by American forces. It was subsequently revealed that the
incident never took place – but that was after hundreds of
thousands of soldiers and civilians were killed in the Vietnam
War.
Many believe that the events of September 11 were another such
provocation using a terrorist organization infiltrated by the CIA
and under its effective control. There is no other logical
explanation for the complete failure of the interception of the
hijacked planes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon. September 11 has been used by Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney
and others to launch the phony ‘war on
terrorism'.
The "war on terrorism' requires a steady stream of
alleged "terrorist' actions and who better to arrange
them than the CIA and Rumsfeld's "Proactive,
Preemptive Operations Group' or other "special'
forces.'
As William D. Hartung explains, under "the leadership of
Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Perle, the DSB has been transformed
from a nonpartisan advisory body designed to give the secretary
of defense a broader range of views on pressing security issues
into a megaphone for the rigid policy preferences of the
secretary of defense. In the run-up to the March 2003 U.S.
intervention in Iraq, Perle, former CIA Director R. James
Woolsey, former Reagan administration Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency head Kenneth Adelman, former House Speaker
Newt Gingrich, and the other appointees to the thirty-member DSB
were all over the press and television, stumping for Donald
Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz's war.' It was this
coterie of Strausscons, with the help of Douglas Feith and the
Office of Special Plans, who came up with the lies and
fabrications to make the invasion possible, most notably
Saddam's non-existent weapons of mass destruction and his
fictitious relationship with Osama bin Laden.
But, according to Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita, who
characterized Seymour Hersh's article in the New Yorker
last week as a work of fiction, the SSB does not exist.
"There is no unit that is directly reportable to the
Secretary of Defense for clandestine operations as is described
in the Washington Post article of January 23, 2005? and the
department "is not attempting to ‘bend'
statutes to fit desired activities,' DiRita said in a
prepared statement issued by the Department of Defense.
Either DiRita is lying or the Pentagon officials mentioned in
the Washington Post made the whole thing up. Considering the
covert activities of the Joint Special Operations Command
enumerated above, Operation Northwoods, P2OG, the "ad hoc
relationship' between Defense Department Special Operations
forces (the Combat Applications Group and the Naval Special
Warfare unit known as SEAL Team 6, also called the Development
Group) and CIA officers, and the urgency of both the Senate
Intelligence and Armed Services Committees to create INTCOM, or
Intelligence Command—a consolidation of the intelligence
branches of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, the
Defense Intelligence Agency, and the three agencies under
Pentagon control that run spy satellites and intercept enemy
communications: the National Reconnaissance Office, the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Security
Agency—headed by a four-star general or admiral, there is a
good chance the Pentagon officials who talked with the Washington
Post are on to something DiRita and Rumsfeld want to keep
secret.
I wonder how long it will be before Michael Ledeen, the big
kahuna of the attack Iran crowd, calls for the editors of the
Washington Post to be sent to Camp Gitmo, as he echoed the Moonie
Tony Blankley's call for Seymour Hersh to be put to death,
or at least locked up for life, because he spilled the beans
about what the Strausscon side of the Pentagon is doing in
Iran?
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