Pentagon's Covert Activities Come Under Senate Scrutiny

Congress's new Democratic majority is expanding its review of the Bush administration's push for broad executive power, as the Senate is set to look into how the Pentagon has increased its covert intelligence operations.

Lawmakers plan to study whether the Pentagon obtained the proper authorization for covert operations and notified Congress as required under the law. The inquiry will also explore whether the Pentagon engaged in activities that legally are the responsibility of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The hearings, to be conducted by the Senate Intelligence Committee beginning March 1, stem from concerns of some lawmakers, particularly Democrats, about an expansion of Defense Department intelligence actions under former Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Critics have said the effort amounts to building a parallel intelligence network that competes with the CIA, but without the broader oversight under which the CIA operates.

Republican congressional leaders had overruled previous efforts by some lawmakers to investigate the expansion, but they lost control of Congress this month. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., W.Va.), the panel's new chairman, has supported such a review and scheduled the hearing.

While the hearings will focus on military covert activity abroad, congressional Democrats and some Republicans also are interested in domestic intelligence activities launched by the Pentagon and other federal agencies since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The new activities include data-mining and domestic warrantless wiretapping. Critics say they threaten privacy and civil liberties. The Senate Judiciary Committee, under its new chairman, Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.), held two hearings this month on these activities. People involved with the Intelligence panel's plans said the hearing witnesses likely will include new Defense Secretary Robert Gates...

Don't forget Rockefeller's foreign entanglements:

November 14, 2005, 3:41 p.m.
Rockefeller's Confession :What was the West Virginia Democrat doing as a freelancing prewar diplomat?

By William J. Bennett

Yesterday, on Fox News Sunday, the following exchange took place between Chris Wallace and U.S. Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:

WALLACE: "Now, the President never said that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat. As you saw, you did say that. If anyone hyped the intelligence, isn't it Jay Rockefeller? "

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: "No. The — I mean, this question is asked a thousand times and I'll be happy to answer it a thousand times. I took a trip by myself in January of 2002 to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, and I told each of the heads of state that it was my view that George Bush had already made up his mind to go to war against Iraq — that that was a predetermined set course which had taken shape shortly after 9/11."

While Democrats in Washington are berating the White House for having prewar intelligence wrong, a high-profile U.S. senator, member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, who has a name more internationally recognizable than Richard Cheney's, tells two putative allies (Saudi Arabia and Jordan) and an enemy who is allied with Saddam Hussein (Syria) that the United States was going to war with Iraq. This is not a prewar intelligence mistake, it is a prewar intelligence giveaway.

Syria is not only on the list of state sponsors of terrorism and the country many speculate is where Hussein has secreted weapons, it is also the country from which terrorists are flowing into Iraq to fight our troops and allies. Jordan and Saudi Arabia have had, over the years, conflicted loyalties. What was Senator Rockefeller doing? What was he thinking? And all this before President Bush even made a public speech about Iraq — to the U.N. or anyone else.

We can have our umpteenth investigation into what the White House knew and when it knew it about Iraqi weapons — we will find the same answer: It knew what President Clinton, Sandy Berger, Madeline Albright, and William Cohen knew when they made speeches about the dangers of Iraq in the late 1990s and when President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act. How about an investigation, now, into what exactly Senator Jay Rockefeller told Syria and just what Syria might have done with the information made available to them presumably before it was made available to the U.N., the Senate, or the American people.

Senators and congressmen don't have to agree with their president's policies, and they should make the president robustly defend his policies — but they should not be acting as if they are the president or secretary of state; they should not be tipping off sometimes friends and definitive enemies about war plans that not even the president has yet made as policy. This is the true mockery of prewar intelligence, and Senator Rockefeller should fully explain his actions.

If Syria — or elements in Saudi Arabia — began acting on this information before we even went to war in Iraq (more than a year later), then Senator Rockefeller may have seriously harmed, impeded, and hindered our war efforts, our troops, and the entire operation in the Middle East. This should be investigated immediately; and perhaps Senator Rockefeller should step down from the Intelligence Committee until an investigation is complete.

— William J. Bennett is the host of the nationally syndicated radio show, Bill Bennett's Morning in America, and the Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/bennett200511141541.asp

[snip]... "We've done a little bit of work on the Number-three guy in the Defense Department, Douglas Feith, part of his alleged efforts to run intelligence past the intelligence community altogether ... and was he running private intelligence failure, which is not lawful?" Mr. Rockefeller said Friday at the joint press conference with committee Chairman Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican.

    "The committee's report fails to fully explain the environment of intense pressure in which the intelligence community officials were asked to render judgments," Mr. Rockefeller said.

    At issue is a special team Mr. Feith set up after the September 11 attacks to examine any linkage between Saddam Hussein's regime and international terrorists, including Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda. Mr. Feith's personnel examined years of intelligence reports on Iraq-al Qaeda contacts, put them into a briefing and delivered it to the CIA, which was compiling a report in 2002 called "Iraqi Support for Terrorism."

    Defense officials, who asked not to be named, said yesterday that Mr. Rockefeller's charges against Mr. Feith are not supported by his own bipartisan report.....[/snip]

-----Pentagon challenges Rockefeller on Feith hit , July 13, 2004

[snip]
The Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into whether Democratic Senators Dick Durbin, Jay Rockefeller and Ron Wyden leaked details about a secret "black ops" CIA satellite program last December [2004] in a move that may have seriously compromised national security, former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Jed Babbin said on Saturday.

"The CIA made a request to the Justice Department to investigate and possibly bring criminal charges against these three [senators]," Babbin told WABC Radio host Monica Crowley. "My information is that investigation is ongoing."
Mr. Rockefeller is the Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Mr. Durbin is the number two ranking Democrat in the Senate.

Media reports on the satellite leak last December indicated that the Bush administration was concerned about public comments by Durbin, Rockefeller and Wyden and that the CIA had requested a Justice Department probe.

"The formal request for a leaks investigation would target people who described sensitive details about a new generation of spy satellites to The Washington Post, which published a page-one story about the espionage program Saturday [Dec. 11, 2004]," a Justice Department official told the Associated Press at the time.

But the same official told the AP that Justice "has not decided whether to investigate." [/snip]
...
------- "Report: Justice Department Probing Durbin, Rockefeller CIA Leak ," by Carl Limbacher , NewsMax, 7/23/05, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1449050/posts

CLOSING IN (The net tightens on Rockefeller and Durbin)

The American Spectator ^ | 2/27/2006 | The Prowler

Posted on 02/27/2006 5:37:56 AM PST by livesbygrace

Word out of the Defense Intelligence Agency and law enforcement sources has the FBI and the Department of Justice comparing notes and dates on who in the U.S. Senate received national security briefings on both the overseas terrorist prisons and the NSA overseas terrorist monitoring programs, and when those briefings took place.

"The number of Senators who received briefings is not as large as people think," says one law enforcement source. "These were programs with a limited 'Need to Know" list on Capitol Hill."

Federal investigators looking into the leaks of both those programs to the press are zeroing in on the Senate, and are expected to continue to hold interviews of both Senators and their senior staff in the coming days. "This investigation is moving forward at a pretty fast clip," says the law enforcement source. "We're not looking at a two-year probe. We're talking about moving fast."
As yet, cooperation from the media outlets -- the Washington Post and the New York Times has been minimal, but investigators aren't sure they will need full cooperation to make the case. "The Hill may be all we need," says the source.

Focus of the investigation remains on the staffs of two Senators, Sen. Jay Rockefeller and Sen. Dick Durbin, as well as committee staff for the Senate Intelligence Committee and career intelligence staff detailed to U.S. Senate offices and committees. Last week, it was revealed that on February 17 Senator Rockefeller had sent a letter to the White House claiming that the Bush Administration had illegally leaked classified materials to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward for a book project he was working on with cooperation from the Bush White House.

A number of people of Capitol Hill and in the intelligence community interpreted the letter as an attempt by Rockefeller to play defense should it be revealed that his office or staff tied to him on the Intelligence Committee are somehow involved in the serious leak ...

This thread relates to this old story the Pat Lang / Agee / VIPS people keep stirring up over the OSP :

Democrats Target Pentagon Planning
Insight Magazine ^ | Nov. 24, 2003 | Kenneth R. Timmerman

......So how did a legitimate and effective Iraq planning office [the Pentagon's OSP] get painted as a dire "cabal?" As incredible as it may seem, it began with conspiracy-theorist Lyndon LaRouche, a self-styled Democratic Party presidential aspirant who claimed in March that a "cabal" of pro-Israel conservatives he called the "Children of Satan" were running a rogue intelligence operation at the Pentagon. Their mission: fabricate intelligence and drag the United States into a needless war, all at Israel's bidding. It was all very dark, murky and conspiratorial. If responsible journalists had been doing their job, the story never would have crept from the LaRouche Website into the light.

Instead, like a virus jumping from animals to humans, the story erupted in a May 6 article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Hersh, a former New York Times investigative reporter, pumped it up into a full-blown feature of 5,500 words. He quoted former Defense Intelligence Agency officers who had never set foot in the Pentagon office or had any direct dealings with it and used sources such as Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA official who in 1995 was cited as a witness for a convicted terrorist leader. "Hersh was briefed on this office and told all about it, but he wrote it anyway," an administration official says. Since Hersh's piece, the virus migrated to Newsweek, Time, Britain's Guardian newspaper and now has become the subject of an inquiry by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

"They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal," Hersh wrote breathlessly. "These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after Sept. 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and [U.S.] policy toward Iraq. ... By last fall, the operation rivaled both the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, as President [George W.] Bush's main source of intelligence regarding Iraq's possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with al-Qaeda."

In the world of the conspiracy theorist, the real "director" of the special-plans office was not Luti but Abram Shulsky, a scholarly expert in the works of the long-deceased political philosopher Leo Strauss, according to Hersh. Strauss was a longtime University of Chicago professor who died in 1973. Taking LaRouche's lead, Hersh painted Shulsky as the secret leader of a cabal of American Jews whom he alleged were perpetrating a massive fraud on the American people. The term "cabal" is favored by anti-Semites and LaRouche to describe their claims of a Jewish world conspiracy. (In fact, the office was run by Luti, but it may be that his name didn't fit the conspiratorial bill).

Britain's left-wing Guardian newspaper called Luti's office a "shadow, right-wing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force." But the real crime of the OSP was to listen to defectors who had been brought out of Iraq by the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC) led by Ahmad Chalabi, the Guardian and others alleged. In late September, Time magazine "revealed" that INC Washington representative Francis Brooke was "in weekly contact" with Luti by phone.

Chalabi indeed did visit once with Luti at the OSP in fall 2002, according to the visitor sign-in sheet in Luti's front office. Chalabi also visited with the secretary of defense, the deputy secretary and a host of other top officials and members of Congress. And Chalabi proudly has acknowledged to this reporter and many others the INC's role in recruiting defectors and presenting them to the U.S. government. In the Iraq of Saddam Hussein, being able to recruit defectors was literally priceless.

The INC's intelligence-collection program, run for years on a shoestring by Chalabi and a few top aides, was taken over by the Pentagon in 2002 and handed over to the Defense Human Service - the human intelligence (HUMINT) side of the DIA - not the Office of Special Plans. "DHS established rules and regulations and put it on a professional basis," a Pentagon official told Insight before the war.

Luti's office now stands accused by Sens. Rockefeller and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) of illegally organizing clandestine intelligence operations overseas. In an Oct. 1 request for documents to Undersecretary Feith on behalf of Democrats sitting on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, Rockefeller quoted an article in the left-wing weekly The Nation alleging that Feith's staff "have been coordinating their terrorism assessments with 'a rump unit established last year in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel.'" The letter also alleged that Luti's staff had been "sent abroad to meet with defectors produced by the INC," and had held unauthorized meetings with "Iranians" in Western Europe.

"This is Church committee stuff," an administration official tells Insight, referring to the disastrous Senate Select Intelligence Committee of the mid-1970s that was responsible for gutting the CIA's clandestine services. "The SSIC is more worried about getting the president than it is in fixing the intelligence mess," this source says. Little wonder that Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.) has said that if what his fellow Democrats have done on the SSIC to try to undermine the war effort in Iraq for political purposes is not treason, then "it is its first cousin." As election fever takes hold of the most partisan Democrats, many expect it to get worse....

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