Antifascist Calling...
During Cambone's tenure, he oversaw the secretive Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA) at the Pentagon, a repressive operation that spied on antiwar activists and has been linked to human rights violations at America's "premier" gulags at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Here's the kicker: less than two months after leaving office, Cambone joined one of a multitude of "security" corporations that have proliferated like poisonous mushrooms after a warm rain in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. According to Shorrock:
A Pentagon office that claims to monitor terrorist threats to U.S. military bases in North America -- and was once reprimanded by the U.S. Congress for spying on antiwar activists -- has just awarded a multi-million dollar contract to a company that employs one of Donald Rumsfeld's former aides, That aide, Stephen Cambone, helped create the very office that issued the contract.On January 7, QinetiQ (pronounced "kinetic") North America (QNA), a major British-owned defense and intelligence contractor based in McLean, Virginia, announced that its Mission Solutions Group, formerly Analex Corporation, has just signed a five-year, $30 million contract to provide a range of unspecified "security services" to the Pentagon's Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office, known as CIFA.
According to Pentagon briefing documents, CIFA's Directorate of Field Activities "assists in preserving the most critical defense assets, disrupting adversaries and helping control the intelligence domain." Another CIFA directorate, the Counterintelligence and Law Enforcement Center, "identifies and assesses threats" to military personnel, operations and infrastructure from "insider threats, foreign intelligence services, terrorists, and other clandestine and covert entities," according to the Pentagon. A third CIFA directorate, Behavorial Sciences, has provided "a team of renowned forensic psychologists [who] are engaged in risk assessments of the Guantanamo Bay detainees."
The unseemliness of awarding a contract to a Bush-connected crony involved in some of the most nauseating operations of the so-called "war on terror" has largely escaped the media's purview. While spying on antiwar activists, inciting violence at demonstrations by well-paid provocateurs and torturing hapless Iraqi prisoners is "standard operating procedure" for various agents of repression, you would think the cyclonic nature of Cambone's passage through Washington's ubiquitous "revolving door" would attract at least a passing interest from pundits. You would be wrong.
During an admitedly brief Google search, I found one, count it, one, mention of Cambone's appointment as QinetiQ's new senior vice president for strategy. The notice, a two-liner buried in the November 7, 2007 Washington Post's Business Appointments page, made no mention of Cambone's "accomplishments" as a Rumsfeldian apparatchik specializing in repression and torture.
Unlike Monica's blue dress, some stains just don't wash out.
4 comments:
Increasingly the line between corporations and governments is blurring. No allegiance to nation or respect for boundaries. Just pursuit of money and power, gained through undercutting social structures. It's an ugly future being created for us.
Cambone is not just a random, if particularly unsavory, Rumsfeld apparatchik involved in the usual sort of revolving door shenanigans. His name comes up in so many contexts that I have to think he's a major behind-the-scenes player in himself.
Like, say, Karl Rove in the White House, Cambone occupied a nexus of unusual power within the DoD. As that CorpWatch article says:
QinetiQ’s main reason for hiring Stephen Cambone was the fact that he had held the unprecedented job of commanding the full spectrum of defense intelligence agencies controlled by the Pentagon, under the 2002 legislation that created his position as the nation’s first undersecretary of defense for intelligence. For example he had direct line control over the three national intelligence collection agencies, the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
He also oversaw CIFA, which he helped set up in 2003 and transformed into one of the U.S. government’s largest collectors of domestic intelligence. ... Cambone was the chief architect of Rumsfeld’s so-called “transformation” policies at the Pentagon, which fused data flowing from those agencies into the Pentagon’s high-tech war machine. ...
With their newfound power, Rumsfeld and Cambone set about to give the Pentagon greater authority in the area of human intelligence, traditionally dominated by the CIA. In 2005, Rumsfeld created a new clandestine espionage branch called the Strategic Support Branch, run out of the DIA and under Cambone’s control, to end what he called his “near total dependence” on the CIA. ...
Those were heady days for Cambone: in May 2006, the New York Times would comment that Cambone’s “low public profile masks his status as one of the most powerful intelligence officials in the United States.”
That's not just questionable activities. That's an attempt to created an unaccountable power base within the Pentagon, evading the controls placed on the CIA over many years, and essentially arrogating the right to set and carry out a private line of foreign policy, using covert operations and special forces.
Morever, even though Cambone was only appointed to the newly-created post of undersecretary of defense for intelligence in March 2003, he had been given oversight over all DoD intelligence operations by Paul Wolfowitz as early as May 2001. In both positions, Cambone worked closely with Doug Feith and Stephen Hadley on projects like those described in this piece by Larisa Alexandrovna.
Cambone also had close ties to Generals Boykin and Schoomaker -- see, for example, this post at Orcinus.
Secretary of Defense Gates has allegedly cleaned up some of the mess that Rumsfeld and Cambone left behind at DoD. But power grabs like that don't just fade away, and I have to believe that this Qinetiq deal -- especially given Qinetiq's own unsavory history (cough, Carlyle Group, cough) -- is part of a more extended agenda.
starroute writes:
"That's not just questionable activities. That's an attempt to created an unaccountable power base within the Pentagon, evading the controls placed on the CIA over many years, and essentially arrogating the right to set and carry out a private line of foreign policy, using covert operations and special forces."
I don't disagree, but my intent, again, was not to provide voluminous detail and analysis of every trend but as a pointer to the CorpWatch piece.
Investigative journalist Joseph Trento, among others, has provided explosive detail in his 2005 book, Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America's Private intelligence Network.
But this too, is not a new phenomenon. Peter Dale Scott, Jonathan Marshall and Jane Hunter did the same way back in 1987 in their book, The Iran-Contra Connection. They argued that because of Watergate, future administrations would "privatize" the state's intelligence function so as to provide "plausible deniability" for illegal covert activities as well as short-circuiting Congress' oversight of CIA.
Needless to say, these trends accelerated under Ford and then Carter (the Safari Club's role in Afghanistan), but were continued by successive administrations.
Damn good post. You're better than the other guy.
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