In
SusanHu's diary about the Niger memo we hear retired intelligence officer Pat Lang explain:
It is very clear now that this ducument was forged by a couple of the shadowy ex-government characters who dwell in the environs of Washington. . .
(more below)
In
Hersh's new piece we get:
I was informed by several former military and intelligence officials that the activities were kept, in part, "off thethe books". They were conducted by retired C.I.A. officers and other non-government personnel, and used funds that were not necessarily appropriated by Congress. Some in the White House and at the Pentagon believed that keeping an operation off the books eliminated the need to give a formal briefing to the relevant members of Congress and congressional intelligence committees, whose jurisdiction is limited, in their view, to officially sanctioned C.I.A. operations. (The Pentagon is known to be running clandestine operations today in North Africa and Central Asia with little or no official C.I.A. involvement.)
As it turns out, two of the major moments in the Iraq War, the "Niger memo" and the "free elections" have both turned out to have been stage managed by non-governmental ex-spies clandestinely serving the interests of the Executive branch.
There is of course, ample precedent in Central and South America, where covert operations have always been a mix of CIA and private contractors.
But it becomes clear that the elevation of Negroponte and Goss as a means to control the intelligence agaencies is in part a distraction from what is going on: the creation of a rogue intelligence network that does not answer to Pelosi and the legislature, to the courts, or to the voters.
Clearly, the threat is the lack of oversight. This network answers to whom? Cheney and Rumsfeld? And after the next election, to whom? Still Cheney and Rumsfeld? This little exercise in connecting dots may seem a little basic, but the existence of a "rogue intelligence network" is something that I thought it would be worth saying a little more explicitly.