Larisa Alexandrovna: Missing Pilot Speicher, Chalabi, Cheney's Ghost Team and Sy Hersh's Team?

[Hissyspit]

http://www.atlargely.com/atlargely/2009/08/chalabi-cheney-and-captain-michael-scott-speicher.html#more

AUGUST 02, 2009

Chalabi, Cheney and Captain Michael Scott Speicher

Several years ago I reported the lengths to which Dick Cheney was willing to go to justify off-book missions in Iraq, including using the claims of a captured US navy captain Michael Scott Speicher being held by Saddam Hussein's military. Cheney's go-to official source of lies (to give Cheney plausible deniability) on this and everything else was Ahmed Chalabi. Here is a few snips from that article:

"New allegations indicate that American civilian military leadership may have used an off-book quasi-military team to address political issues, placing those concerns above securing peace in the region, RAW STORY has learned.

Three U.S. intelligence sources and a source close to the United Nations Security Council say that the Pentagon civilian leadership under the guidance of Stephen Cambone, appointed to lead Defense Department intelligence in March 2003, dispatched a series of “off book” missions out of the ultra-secretive Office of Special Plans (OSP). The team was tasked to secure the following in order of priority: fallen Navy pilot Scott Speicher, WMD and Saddam Hussein.

While it is known that an authorized special operations unit was dispatched before the invasion of Iraq with similar objectives, sources say another team also operated on the ground in Iraq, primarily from the summer until the fall of 2003. This team appears to have been composed of 4-5 men."

I have often referred to this OSP/Cheney team as the ghost team, but was always troubled by several factors.

The most fascinating element of the ghost-team's make-up is that they appeared to have the highest security clearances, because they shadowed legit special forces which means they knew team movements and composition. No known task force or special ops unit was aware of them, yet the ghost team was aware of task force movements and objectives.

In fact, the ghost-team adopted the same objectives of special forces, using those objectives as cover for why they were really in Iraq. One of those objectives was to locate Navy pilot Scott Speicher, even though most intel officials believed that the captain had long been dead and even though the legit teams were already looking for him or his remains.

From my same article:

"Sources say the Office of Special Plans deployed several extra-legal and unapproved task force missions prior to and after combat operations began. Under the supervision of Doug Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, the OSP ran largely unsupervised and operated in secrecy. According to those familiar with the plans, the off-book missions were approved by Feith -- himself currently under investigation by the FBI for allegations of passing US secrets to Israel and Iran -- Cambone and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

"But the lines between what were considered sanctioned forces and those considered almost as rogue units began to blur shortly after the invasion. Whether this was done deliberately to misrepresent official military, CIA, and other operations missions in the region, or whether this confusion stems from a lack of coordination remains unknown.

It is also difficult to establish whether or not TF20’s various sub-teams were used by civilian leadership to achieve other goals, not known to the primary unit.

What is, however, apparent is that the Office of Special Plans’ teams were deployed in obscurity and on occasion even bumped into sanctioned special ops teams, creating a sense of unease among the various forces on the ground.

Sources raised most concern about an alleged off-book 4-5 man team which operated in the summer through the fall of 2003. What this team was doing and under whose authority it operated is unclear."

While the legit advanced teams had completed their mission by late March of 03, the ghost-team stayed well into August of '03, still using the claim that they were searching for Speicher. There have been serious allegations regarding what they were actually doing. I will let you read those allegations for yourself in that same article.

What is interesting and new now is the latest news that Captain Speicher's remains have been located and identified. It is now clear that he died fairly early on, either upon impact after his plane was shot down in 1991 during the first Gulf War or shortly thereafter.

But the ghost-team has still to be identified. Perhaps if they had actually looked for Speicher rather than the off-book games they were playing, his family would have had closure six years ago. I also wonder if this team is the same team that Sy Hersh has referred to. There is, however, no way of getting to the bottom of this without a Congressional investigation. The ghost-team was so secretive, that even the special ops leaders had no idea who they were working for.

RIP Captain Speicher, finally.

Mods, reproduced in entirety with permission.

[troubledamerican]

1. The Ghost Team is still around.

Why would Larisa use past tense?

Sy Hersh didn't.

[Kurovski]

2. K&R. (nt)

[bleever]

3. K&R.

Reminds me of the Brits who were captured disguised as insurgents.

[MADem]

4. Cheney declared Scott Speicher DEAD at the end of Gulf One.

He was SECDEF at the time and he didn't want the "question" of a wounded, wandering or captured Scott ruining the victory parades for Bush One.

CLINTON "resurrected" Scott after people (Navy people, by and large) complained that Cheney was too hasty.

THEN, "Oh the fucking IRONY" Cheney not only continues with the resurrection of the guy that HE declared dead, he USES him--and puts him in a fictional POW camp to rile up the masses.

We knew that was bullshit. We also knew Scott was probably dead. We just thought it incredibly unseemly that Cheney, the fucking SECDEF, would kick over the traces on the guy so quickly so his corpse wouldn't "ruin the party."

Cheney's an asshole, but we knew that already.

[leveymg]

5. Cambone and Boykin's "Gray Fox" units were dissolved

In April of 2003, Rumsfeld placed Cambone in charge of counter-terrorism teams operating under the code-name "Grey Fox". This covert operation is a kind of sabotage and assassination squad run out of the civil wing of the Pentagon. Rumsfeld had grown frustrated with the military's reluctance to assassinate suspected al-Qaeda and Iraqi resistance leaders, an understandable reluctance in light of US executive orders restricting the use of assassinations. So Rumsfeld seized control of the hit teams from the generals and assigned it to Cambone, a civilian appointee with no military experience. The Gray Fox project, so one Washington Post report concluded, is geared to perform "deep penetration" missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Syria and North Korea, setting up listening posts, conducting acts of sabotage and assassination. When questioned about Gray Fox, Cambone snapped, "We won't talk about those things".

However, military officers did talk about Gray Fox. "The people in these units are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, anywhere around the world. They are very highly trained, with specialized skills for dealing with close-quarters combat and unique situations posed by weapons of mass destruction", a military officer told Army Times. "If we find a high-value target somewhere, anywhere in the world, and if we have the forces to get there and get to them, we should get there and get to them", the official said. "Right now, there are 18 food chains, 20 levels of paperwork and 22 hoops we have to jump through before we can take action. Our enemy moves faster than that".

Aside from guarding Rumsfeld from assaults from within the Pentagon, Cambone's main role seems to be cutting through red tape and bothersome codes of conduct, such as the Geneva Conventions, to institute legally questionable policies. Take the treatment of Iraqi prisoners. The orders to soften up Iraqi prisoners for intelligence interrogators (both military and private contractors) came directly from Cambone's office.

In August 2003, as the occupation of Iraq began to turn bloody, Cambone ordered Brigadier General Geoffrey Miller, former commander of the detention facility at Guantanamo, to go to Iraq along with a team of experienced military interrogators, who had honed their inquisitorial skills with the torture of al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees captured in Afghanistan. His instructions were to "Gitmoize" the interrogations at Abu Ghraib and other prisons, including the notorious Camp Cropper on the outskirts of the Baghdad Airport, where the Delta Force conducted abusive interrogations of top level members of Saddam's regime.

Cambone's top deputy inside the military is none other than Lt. General William Boykin, the Christian warrior, whom Cambone and Rumsfeld elevated to the position to the position of intelligence czar for the US Army last fall. Boykin rose to this lofty eminence after he went on a revival tour of evangelical churches in Oregon, where he disclosed the top secret intelligence that the US "had been attacked because we are a Christian nation". Boykin also leaked the news that Bush's war on terrorism was actually "a war against Satan".
Boykin calmed the congregations by saying there was little reason to fear because the Christian god is mightier than Allah. "I know that my god is bigger than his", Boykin preached. "I know that my god is a real God and his an idol". The general also revealed to the faithful that the supreme deity of the Christians had hand-picked Bush to be president during these fraught times. It was obvious, the general reasoned, that Bush didn't win the election. He became president through a kind of preemptive strike by the Almighty.

When word of Boykin's sermons landed on the front page of the Los Angeles Times in October of 2003, there was outrage in the American Islamic community that this two-star zealot was now directing US military intelligence operations in the Middle East. There were calls for his ouster and the Inspector General of the Army launched an investigation of Boykin. But Rumsfeld and Cambone shrugged off the probe and stood by Boykin.

It now turns out that Boykin, the Islamophobe, played a central role in the torture scandal now gripping the Bush administration. Last summer, Boykin briefed Cambone on a list of no-holds-barred interrogation methods that he thought should be used to extract more information from Iraqi detainees.

These included humiliation, sleep deprivation, restraint, water torture, religious taunting, light deprivation, and other techniques of torture that have since come to light. A few weeks after this crucial meeting in June, Cambone sent General Miller to Iraq with instructions to oversee the implementation of the Boykin interrogation plan in order to "rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence". According to Lt. General Antonio Taguba, who investigated the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Miller then instructed the Military Police to become "actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of internees". The grim trio of Cambone, Boykin and Miller also conspired to put the control of the detention facilities in Iraq under the tactical control of military intelligence. At Abu Ghraib, the job fell to Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, a move that Lt. General Taguba called contrary to established military doctrine.

It now seems likely that Cambone was only the one to invite Israeli advice (and perhaps interrogators) on how to extract information from Iraqi detainees. Before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Cambone freely admitted to the Washington Times that he was taking advice from the Israelis and sharing intelligence with them on the mechanics of occupation and interrogation. "Those who have to deal with like problems tend to share information as best they can".

SNIP

As Rumsfeld's hatchetman, Cambone has become so hated and feared inside the Pentagon that one general told the Army Times: "If I had one round left in my revolver, I'd take out Stephen Cambone". This raises the concept of fragging to an entirely new level.

This essay is excerpted from Jeffrey St. Clair's new book, Grand Theft Pentagon. http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair02072006.html

[leveymg]

6. More on the DoD targeted assassination squads

http://www.democracynow.org/2003/12/9/manhunt_in_iraq_israel_trains_u

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Seymour Hersh. I’m looking at a piece in today’s “Guardian” following up on your piece that came out yesterday in the “New Yorker” where Julian Borger quotes a U.S. Intelligence official- former. “This is basically an assassination program. That’s what’s being conceptualized here. This is a hunter-killer team.” He says, “It’s bonkers, insane. Here we are. We’re already being compared to Sharon in the Arab world, and we have just confirmed it by bringing in the Israelis and setting up assassination teams.” And goes on to say that the Israeli so-called ‘consultants’ have not only been at Ft. Bragg but also in Iraq with U.S. troops.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Am I supposed to comment on that?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

SEYMOUR HERSH: I didn’t dispute that. I think—I didn’t write that, but I—you know, if you—only because, you know, the “New Yorker” has a very appropriately you know-–you need more than one source for certain things, but certainly, that’s in the air. It depends how you define ‘consultants’. But the basic line is obviously, if anything, I know this is—everybody’s going to lose their breakfast, but I’m probably inside the facts. Do you know what I mean? I’m within what the reality is. It’s probably a little more acute, there’s probably even more cooperation and particularly with—in terms of prisoners. But you know it’s just—the bottom line is, Donald Rumsfeld has wanted since 9-11, more than two years ago, to get this manhunts—he called it ‘manhunts’ with a plural, he has wanted to get manhunts going. He has wanted to be able to—the Pentagon has assembled a list of what they call ‘High Value Targets’, H.V.T., and they are also known as ‘Time Sensitive Targets’, T.S.T. They have all of those acronyms and letters. They tried- last year we wrote—I wrote a piece in the “New Yorker” about an attack on somebody in Yemen, a former Al Qaeda person in Yemen. Other people had written about it, but the point I made in the story I wrote was that it was the first manhunt. And there were a lot of questions about what happened. There were two previous attempts. They were firing from an unarmed—unmanned airplane known as a ‘predator’, a hellfire missile. And twice the missile had been targeted at other cars before they finally got the guys they got. And both cars they were waived off, at the last minute in one case, because they were full of innocent Bedouins. The intelligence wasn’t good. They finally got their man. When they got him, five other people were with him. One of them was an American citizen, presumed to be bad guys, but they weren’t on the H.V.T., High Value Target list. So there was a lot of questions. And you know the military, the American military is a very, very cautious bureaucracy. And there were a lot of guys inside that don’t like the idea of being hunter-killer teams. That’s not what the military does, Even in Delta and the S.E.A.L. teams. These are, they’re soldiers, and they fight wars, and they don’t do targeted assassinations.

Rumsfeld, to get his way–he couldn’t get his way last year. He has basically changed, I know I wrote a little bit about this in the New Yorker, he has changed a lot of the personnel. He has gotten rid of people that fought him, and this is his prerogative. And he has put in the Army positions of command people who are much more supportive of what he and some his aides want to do; that is work with the Israelis and others to begin killing people. And so, this is his show. I’m sure the President, yes, the President obviously approves, and the Vice President, Cheney. They all work very closely together. I’m not sure where the C.I.A. is on it. I think, you know, these guys are in a real dilemma. They’re not winning. They can’t win the war militarily, and from George Bush’s point of view, they can’t lose the war politically. So, the answer in the short run seems to be to escalate. And they’re going to escalate with targeted bombing and targeted killings, and if that doesn’t work, I don’t know what else they’ll do.

[Hissyspit]

7. morning kick nt

[Mnemosyne]

8. KnR for Larisa! Thanks Hissy! n/t