Posted on 10/08/2002 11:26:52 PM PDT by HAL9000
The man being touted to become the proposed Department of Homeland Security's intelligence czar is deeply involved with many of the Clinton administration officials who share much of the blame for the massive intelligence failures that led up to 9/11 - a blame he must share as a former top official of the CIA in the Clinton years.
According to the Washington Times, John Gannon, a former top CIA official, is believed to be in line to become the intelligence chief of Homeland Security when it becomes a reality.
During the Clinton administration, Gannon served as deputy director for Intelligence (DDI) at CIA, July 1995 to July 1997; chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), July 1997 to June 2001, and assistant director of central intelligence for analysis and production, July 1998-June 2001.
Were he to become the intelligence chief at the proposed department, Gannon would hold the key job in the entire intelligence community.
"The homeland intelligence czar must become the top intelligence officer of the land; he must be the chief coordinator, conduit, and collector of intelligence regarding the safety of Americans at home," the Times wrote.
And the man who fills this vital post, the Times continued, should be authorized to be a coordinator who must join together the information from 22 federal agencies.
His second role is to become the conduit of information to the people who will need it most urgently in a crisis: fire departments, police stations, public-safety officials, emergency medical personnel, the first responders who are the earliest to arrive at the scene of a terrorist attack. He would become a single, authoritative source in the federal government. The homeland intelligence czar must fill that void, the Times wrote.
His most controversial role will be that of collector of information. He will need "the power to reach deep into multi-layered bureaucracies like the FBI or the INS, so that he can receive information unfiltered by headquarters staff - whose competence has been rightly called into question by recent disclosures - circumventing recalcitrant supervisors and managers whenever necessary."
In short, the man should be given enormous powers overshadowing the heads of the FBI, the CIA and all the other intelligence-gathering agencies within the federal government and the armed forces. He would replace the FBI and CIA heads as President Bush's principle source of intelligence information through whom all data from the intelligence community would filter.
Time for a Background Check
If the Times is correct in predicting John Gannon will be named to assume that formidable post, the top intelligence honcho will be a man whose background is anything but reassuring.
Gannon, whose last job in the government was chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, is vice chairman of Intellibridge, a company whose Internet site states that the company "is a strategic knowledge tool providing a total information and intelligence solution for the international corporation."
In this position, the No. 2 job at the company, Gannon is the operational head of many of Intellibridge's activities. He also makes numerous public appearances, speaking mainly as an expert on domestic security.
Many of his associates at Intellibridge served in top posts in the Clinton administration. The chairman and founder of Intellibridge, and Gannon's immediate superior, is Anthony Lake, who once served as Clinton's national security adviser, and was at one time slated to head the CIA before he withdrew from consideration in March 1997 after serious flaws in his background were publicly aired, including his shameful role in supporting the Khmer Rouge takeover in Cambodia, where they promptly set about butchering the Cambodian people.
Lake has an atrocious background:
- Lake, it was revealed, threw his support behind the murderous Khmer Rouge's drive to take over Cambodia. According to Jacob Heilbrunn in the March 24th issue of the liberal New Republic, published a week before Lake announced his withdrawal from consideration for the CIA's top job, Lake was "a curious choice to head the agency responsible for monitoring and challenging America's foes. He has, after all, been reluctant to acknowledge that foes even exist."
He cited a March 9, 1975 Washington Post op-ed column in which Lake "hail[ed] the Khmer Rouge, despite the common knowledge that they were slaughtering innocents ...." To bring "peace" to Cambodia, Lake insisted that the U.S. must not antagonize the Khmer-led forces.
"They are indeed supported by Hanoi, Peking, and Moscow," Lake admitted. "But to the extent we know much about them, they include many Khmer nationalists, Communist and non-Communist. Once they gain power, we must hope for as much nationalism on their part as possible."
'Useless Killing'
Heilbrunn wrote, "Lake called for 'an immediate, peaceful turning over of power' to the Khmer Rouge." A surrender to the communists was inevitable, he wrote, and "would stop the final, useless killing."
Lake said U.S. policy should be to cut off support for the non-communists in order to ease the pain of transition. Non-communists, he said, should not expect to have any role in Cambodia's government.
"Why should the Khmer Rouge agree to share power when they can expect to seize it?" he asked. Once the "useless killing" (i.e., the armed resistance to communism) was brought to an end, the systematic killing commenced.
In his study "Death by Government," R.J. Rummel writes that the Khmer Rouge regime's killing efficiency puts it atop the list of this century's "megamurderers" - governments that have killed more than 1 million of their own subjects. In fact, writes Rummel, "No other megamurderer comes even close to the lethality of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during their 1975 through 1978 rule."
Inordinate Fear of Genocide
Wrote William Norman Grigg in the New American magazine in April 1997: "The people to whom Anthony Lake wanted to hand Cambodia exterminated at least two million people - more that 31 percent of the Cambodian population. Yet in 1977 - at the very height of the bloodletting in Cambodia - Lake wrote Jimmy Carter's notorious Notre Dame speech criticizing America's 'inordinate fear of communism.' Of Lake it can be said that he is often wrong, but never in doubt - even when his policy prescriptions would lead to the deaths of millions."
- Lake once told NBC's "Meet the Press" that the evidence of Alger Hiss' treason was not "conclusive." He also played down Soviet espionage efforts against the United States, stating that "they apparently are spying on us to a degree that we don't like." As Grigg wrote earlier, Lake "sought to rehabilitate a traitor and displayed a remarkably high threshold of tolerance for the KGB's activities within this country."
This is Gannon's boss at Intellibridge. In his top job at CIA, Gannon would have had to work closely with Lake when he was Clinton's national security adviser.
Among Gannon's other fellow Clinton administration officials are:
- David Rothkopf, deputy undersecretary of commerce for international trade during Clinton's first term. According to the Washington Business Journal, Rothkopf founded Intellibridge, originally called Newmarket Co., in the late 1990s after serving for two years as managing director of Kissinger Associates, Inc., the geopolitical consulting group chaired by the former U.S. secretary of state.
In launching Intellibridge, Rothkopf had the help of several former government officials and spooks, including Lake and former CIA director John Deutch, who was accused in 2000 of mishandling sensitive data while serving at the CIA and previously as an undersecretary at the Defense Department. Rothkopf is CEO of Intellibridge.
Giving Away the 'Crown Jewels'
- Deutch, who as CIA director in 1995-96 was Gannon's boss, is a member of Intellibridge's advisory board. According to Bill Gertz of the Washington Times, Deutch compromised some of the most sensitive defense programs by improperly transferring data about ultrasecret Pentagon programs to computers he used to send e-mail and access the Internet.
The compromises, Gertz revealed, occurred sometime after 1994 and "have raised fears among Pentagon security officials that foreign governments obtained access to the 'crown jewels' of the Pentagon's secret weapons, intelligence and military programs, according to defense officials."
Deutch, Gertz revealed, was suspected of using the Internet to send the secret information on so-called special access programs (SAPs) over the commercial Internet service provider America Online as part of a 1,000-page journal he produced during his tenure as deputy defense secretary from 1994 to 1995, when he also was director of the Pentagon's Special Access Program Oversight Committee (SAPOC).
As the head of SAPOC, Deutch sat at the pinnacle of the defense secrecy system involving hundreds of special access programs and ultrasensitive information ranging from exotic weapons development to secrets used during war-fighting operations.
Officials, Gertz wrote, "do not know why Mr. Deutch produced the secret personal journal. However, the biggest fear is that Mr. Deutch has used the information with his international consulting firm, or will do so in the future. Mr. Deutch is currently a co-chairman of the advisory council for Intellibridge Corp., a District of Columbia-based global intelligence and information service for corporations."
The Gore Connection
- Leon Fuerth, former national security adviser to former Vice President Al Gore, is listed as one of Intellibridge's stable of experts, as is former Clinton State Department official Richard Holbrooke.
Ties to Enron
Among Intellibridge's more curious ties was its connection with Enron. In the wake of the California electricity "crisis," Enron hired Intellibridge to improve its public image. Right up to the time when Enron filed for bankruptcy on Dec. 2, 2001, this Clintonista-dominated firm was Enron's "propaganda" arm, developing a news Web site and organizing conferences, which brought regulatory, political, media and business leaders together to discuss the merits of Enron's vision for restructuring the electric power industry across the United States.
Gannon's continuing association with his fellow Clinton administration veterans, and his top roles at the CIA when the terrorist threat was at best ineffectively dealt with, hardly seems to be an appropriate background for the job as intelligence boss at Homeland Security.
Termination with prejudice if they won't go peacefully. In any event they should all be put on an NSA watchlist, and be tapped, and bugged, and surveilled. It would likely prove informative.
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