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Sunday’s News
In today’s papers:
– The Pentagon is reading your(?) financial records and the Army allows itself to listen to your phone.
– Chalabi is still in business.
– The UK’s SAS and U.S. mercenaries are fighting in Somalia
Excerpts from the relevant articles are below the fold.
NYT: Military Is Expanding Its Intelligence Role in U.S.
The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering.
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[I]t was not previously known, even to some senior counterterrorism officials, that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have been using their own “noncompulsory” versions of the [national security] letters. Congress has rejected several attempts by the two agencies since 2001 for authority to issue mandatory letters, in part because of concerns about the dangers of expanding their role in domestic spying.
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In the next year, they plan to incorporate the records into a database at the Counterintelligence Field Activity office at the Pentagon to track possible threats against the military, Pentagon officials said.
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Congressional officials said members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees had been briefed on the use of the letters by the military and the C.I.A.
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NYT: Deletions in Army Manual Raise Wiretapping Concerns
Deep into an updated Army manual, the deletion of 10 words has left some national security experts wondering whether government lawyers are again asserting the executive branch’s right to wiretap Americans without a court warrant.
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The original guidelines, from 1984, said the Army could seek to wiretap people inside the United States on an emergency basis by going to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, or by obtaining certification from the attorney general “issued under the authority of section 102(a) of the Act.”
That last phrase is missing from the latest manual, which says simply that the Army can seek emergency wiretapping authority pursuant to an order issued by the FISA court “or upon attorney general authorization.” It makes no mention of the attorney general doing so under FISA.
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WaPo: Officials: Pentagon Probed Finances
These efforts are overseen by the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity agency, or CIFA, which was established in September 2002 by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz.
CIFA is charged with coordinating policy and overseeing the domestic counterintelligence activities of Pentagon agencies and the armed forces. The agency’s size and budget are classified, but congressional sources have said that the agency spent more than $1 billion through October. One counterintelligence official recently estimated that CIFA has 400 full-time employees and 800 to 900 contractors working for it.
Bonus: Frank Rich’s liberated column: He’s in the Bunker Now
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You thought this guy was gon? Think again:
WaPo: On Iraq, U.S. Turns to Onetime Dissenters
Finally, in 2005, the Shiites and Kurds agreed to reexamine the de-Baathification rules as part of a compromise to get Sunni political parties to support Iraq’s new constitution. The agreement called for a revised de-Baathification law to be enacted by parliament.
But that still hasn’t happened.
In an attempt to get the process moving, Bush used his televised address last week to call on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to embrace the reintegration of former Baathists. Maliki told Bush recently that he supports a revised de-Baathification law — but the issue isn’t in the prime minister’s hands. It’s still with Chalabi.
Chalabi is the chairman of the Supreme National Commission for De-Baathification, which continues to have ultimate authority to decide which ex-Baathists can return to work and which cannot. He has prepared draft legislation that calls for easing some elements of Bremer’s policy, but he said parliament has been unable to act on it because a majority of the members of the legislature’s de-Baathification committee belong to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s political party, which walked out in November to protest a meeting between Maliki and Bush.
Speaking by telephone from Baghdad, Chalabi said he expects progress "pretty soon."
But he said the law will not contain a key demand of the U.S. government: a sunset clause that would abolish the commission, effectively depriving Chalabi of political influence. He called it unconstitutional.
Chalabi said he heard Bush’s call for swift action on the de-Baathification law, but he emphasized that he and his fellow Iraqis, not U.S. officials, are in charge of the legislative timetable.
"We don’t feel any pressure," he said.
—Sunday Times: SAS hunts fleeing Al-Qaeda Africans
AN SAS team is hunting down Al-Qaeda terror suspects as they try to flee war-torn Somalia after the crushing defeat of the country’s Islamist forces last week.
The suspects are trapped between invading Ethiopian troops — assisted by US special forces and American mercenaries — and the Kenyan army and SAS troops who are acting as “training advisers” but have been leading operations along the border, providing a “screen” to trap terrorists.
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The dramatic victory by Ethiopian troops was the culmination of months of preparation inside and outside Somalia by American and British special forces, and US-hired mercenaries.
“The brief was to enter Somali territory with the objective of studying the terrain, mapping and analysing landing sites and regrouping areas, and reporting on suitable ‘entry and exit points’,” one source said.
paul craig roberts, in the article cited previously, correctly states that “Bush’s entire “war on terror” is based on lies,” however he assigns an incorrect underlying causality to the entire pretense:
Bush has made the US into a colony of Israel. The US is incurring massive debt and loss of both life and reputation in order to silence Muslim opposition to Israel’s theft of Palestine and the Golan Heights. That is what the “war on terror” is about.
yes, the GWOT does nicely help out israel and it does capitalize on western societies racist beliefs in the inherent inequality of non-whites, but roberts is apparently either putting us on or has a serious blind spot. does the man honestly believe that this tiny state of seven million & its advocates in the homeland control united states foreign policy? that the united states is a victim of a conspiring jews & jewish-americans? it’s foolish, simple-minded thinking. it may very well converge w/ u.s. goals, but the ‘war on terror’ is not a campaign solely for the benefit of the extremists in the state of israel.
there is a much more obvious reason & the logical contortions that some people — most of them being either in political office or journalism — go through to avoid acknowledging it boggle the mind. in a recent essay, william k. tabb writes that
Today control over the world’s oil supply is at the forefront of Washington policy makers’ thinking, even if the president and his team deny any such intent and talk publically of reducing dependence on Middle East oil by three-quarters of present levels, an absurdly impossible goal. Two-thirds of the oil in the world is in the Middle East, much of it under Iraq and Iran, the axis of oil, the current targets of the U.S. war on terrorism. Control of oil is integral to Washington’s official goal of world domination, a goal stated this baldly in national security documents.
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That the official rationale is now the war on terrorism in place of anticommunism is secondary to the continuation of the basic policy of world domination.
the seeds for this official goal goes back at least to the wolfowitz document on post-cold war defense strategy commissioned by cheney in 1992, were restated in the influential pnac document rebuilding america’s defenses: strategy, forces and resources for a new century, and eventually wound up in, as tabb points out, official national security documents & the usual establishment echo chambers. the want to rule the planet. and space.
as tabb points out
Control of the world is facilitated through control of essential resources. By controlling the world’s energy, and in the presence of its overwhelming military superiority, the United States is potentially able to deny the lifeblood of any society and intimidate and coerce the world more effectively, a design going back easily to Henry Kissinger, and earlier to the emergence of U.S. global power at the end of the Second World War, but now carried to new heights by the neoconservatives.
this effort to control source & distribution channels, as we have seen in the two main fronts of the so-called war on terror – afghanistan (pipelines) & iraq (reserves) – is as important in the larger goal as is obtaining adequate supplies of crude to keep the homeland (and the military) humming. it is not simply a conspiracy by oil companies to grab a piece of the action. indeed, r.t. naylor, in his latest book, writes
That the rate of discovery of new oil has probably peaked and, as a result, fresh supplies are lagging behind the currently rapid growth of worldwide demand as geological realities overtake oil company accounting fantasies, that after two decades of glut the balance of market power power is shifting to the producer countries, that producers are heavily concentrated in the Islamic world, and that emerging great powers like China and India are eyeing the Middle Eat and Central Asia [and Africa] to accomodate their own burgeoning needs combine to form a rather obvious incentive for showing the flag. Oil is the equivalent of the Holy Grail to Western industrial “civilization,” and most of it happens to be located in the same general area that inspired past Crusades — even if the oil companies (and their corporate allies in banking and oil service) are eventually found guilty more as ex post profiteers than as ex ante conspirators.
the agenda is a pax americana, and the drivers are at the highest levels of government & military. the targets are islamic, not because it serves israeli goals, but because it serves u.s. ones.
Posted by: b real | Jan 16 2007 5:16 utc | 112
if you haven’t read michael klare’s article, the global energy race and its consequences, it’s good. but before i get to that, today secdef gates gave a very relevant answer to the question of what this ongoing buildup for a military attack on iran is really about
Gates said the time is not right for diplomatic talks with Iran, but left open that possibility for the future.
After meeting with senior officials at NATO headquarters, Gates was asked at a news conference what was behind the Bush administration’s decision to deploy a Patriot missile battalion and a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf region – moves announced in connection with a further buildup of ground troops in Iraq.
He noted that the United States has taken a leading role in Gulf security for many decades.
“We are simply reaffirming that statement of the importance of the Gulf region to the United States and our determination to be an ongoing strong presence in that area for a long time into the future,” he said.
while “simply” may be an understatement, the reaffirmation is nothing surprising.
in his article on the “global struggle over ever-diminishing supplies of energy,” klare identifies four “basic features” of how this struggle is shaping up. two of those features are directly relevant to gate’s statement.
* The transformation of the U.S. military into a global oil protection service whose primary mission is to defend America’s overseas sources of oil and natural gas, while patrolling the world’s major pipelines and supply routes.
* A ruthless scramble among the great powers for the remaining oil, natural gas, and uranium reserves of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, accompanied by recurring military interventions, the constant installation and replacement of client regimes, systemic corruption and repression, and the continued impoverishment of the great majority of those who have the misfortune to inhabit such energy-rich regions. [italics in original]
client regimes is a key ingredient here. we’ve seen this in afghanistan, w/ oil-man karzai, in iraq, in somalia, rwanda, and no doubt others that have slipped my mind or of which i am not currently aware. the pentagon recently declared their (temporary?) success in installing a client regime in somalia as a blueprint for future actions in similiar settings. and regime change appears to be the objective of aggression on iran, though the somalia model is nowhere near applicable. instead, should the u.s. attempt such in iran, it will most probably follow a plan similar to the efforts to bomb the hell out of iraqis until they turn on their own leaders, which, if attempted again after such stupendous failure in iraq, certainly qualifies as another high/lowlight in their delusional pathologies.
back to gates’ remark that “[w]e are simply reaffirming that statement of the importance of the Gulf region to the United States.” klare writes
Already we have the beginnings of the energy equivalent of a classic arms race, combined with many of the elements of the “Great Game” as once played by colonial powers in some of the same parts of the world.
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The most significant expression of this trend has been the transformation of the U.S. military into a global oil-protection service whose primary function is the guarding of overseas energy supplies as well as their global delivery systems (pipelines, tanker ships, and supply routes). This overarching mission was first articulated by President Jimmy Carter in January 1980, when he described the oil flow from the Persian Gulf as a “vital interest” of the United States, and affirmed that this country would employ “any means necessary, including military force” to overcome an attempt by a hostile power to block that flow.
When President Carter issued this edict, quickly dubbed the Carter Doctrine, the United States did not actually possess any forces capable of performing this role in the Gulf. To fill this gap, Carter created a new entity, the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF), an ad hoc assortment of U.S-based forces designated for possible employment in the Middle East. In 1983, President Reagan transformed the RDJTF into the Central Command (Centcom), the name it bears today. Centcom exercises command authority over all U.S. combat forces deployed in the greater Persian Gulf area including Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. At present, Centcom is largely preoccupied with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it has never given up its original role of guarding the oil flow from the Persian Gulf in accordance with the Carter Doctrine.
controlling the spigots too. and, as has been pointed out recently here at MoA, the u.s. is looking to replace centcom’s role in africa w/ a dedicated african command. that’s how serious this “game” is getting. again, klare
When first promulgated in 1980, the Carter Doctrine was aimed principally at the Persian Gulf and surrounding waters. In recent years, however, American policymakers have concluded that the United States must extend this kind of protection to every major oil-producing region in the developing world. The logic for a Carter Doctrine on a global scale was first spelled out in a bipartisan task force report, “The Geopolitics of Energy,” published by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in November 2000. Because the United States and its allies are becoming increasingly dependent on energy supplies from unstable overseas suppliers, the report concluded, “[T]he geopolitical risks attendant to energy availability are not likely to abate.” Under these circumstances, “the United States, as the world’s only superpower, must accept its special responsibilities for preserving access to worldwide energy supply.”
This sort of thinking — embraced by senior Democrats and Republicans alike — appears to have governed American strategic thinking since the late 1990s. It was President Clinton who first put this policy into effect, by extending the Carter Doctrine to the Caspian Sea basin. It was Clinton who originally declared that the flow of oil and gas from the Caspian Sea to the West was an American security priority, and who, on this basis, established military ties with the governments of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. President Bush has substantially upgraded these ties — thereby laying the groundwork for a permanent U.S. military presence in the region — but it is important to view this as a bipartisan effort in accordance with a shared belief that protection of the global oil flow is increasingly not just a vital function, but the vital function of the American military.
More recently, President Bush has extended the reach of the Carter Doctrine to West Africa, now one of America’s major sources of oil. Particular emphasis is being place on Nigeria, where unrest in the Delta (which holds most of the country’s onshore petroleum fields) has produced a substantial decline in oil output. “Nigeria is the fifth largest source of U.S. oil imports,” the State Department’s Fiscal Year 2007 Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations declares, “and disruption of supply from Nigeria would represent a major blow to U.S. oil security strategy.” To prevent such a disruption, the Department of Defense is providing Nigerian military and internal security forces with substantial arms and equipment intended to quell unrest in the Delta region; the Pentagon is also collaborating with Nigerian forces in a number of regional patrol and surveillance efforts aimed at improving security in the Gulf of Guinea, where most of West Africa’s offshore oil and gas fields are located.
Of course, senior officials and foreign policy elites are generally loathe to acknowledge such crass motivations for the utilization of military force — they much prefer to talk about spreading democracy and fighting terrorism.
so, contrary to paul craig robert’s simplistic conspiracy-mongering, the (secondary) ‘war on terror’ is not being waged against muslims because they are necessarily enemies of israel, but is being waged against muslims & any other groups that resist having their governments stuffed w/ client regimes loyal to imperial interests and do not submit to the idea that their natural wealth should wind up benefiting foreigners. why is that so difficult to comprehend?
Posted by: b real | Jan 16 2007 5:16 utc | 113
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