Rummy gets new powers

During a time of hectic news, like this election, it's easy for our lazy mainstream media to let potentially important news items slip quickly and quietly into the memory hole.  After all, with matters of urgent national import like the Scott Peterson trial and John Kerry's hunting wardrobe to cover, it's inevitable that lower priority items would slip.

I mean, the European Union countries could sign a brand new EU constitution or something, and the American press might scarcely notice.

But here's one worth paying attention to, a story explaining that Don Rumsfeld's Pentagon was just given new authority to hire their own private militias in other countries:  Special Forces Enter CIA Territory With a New Weapon by Greg Miller Los Angeles Times 10/31/04 (also in U.S. military gains authority to fund foreign fighters: New policy allows Pentagon to move into CIA's turf San Francisco Chronicle 10/31/04).

Under the new policy, the U.S. Special Operations Command will have as much as $25 million a year to spend providing "support to foreign forces, irregular forces, groups or individuals" aiding U.S. efforts against terrorists and other targets. Previously, military units were prohibited from providing money or arms to foreign groups.

Pentagon officials said the new capability was crucial in the war on terrorism, enabling America's elite soldiers to buy off tribal leaders or arm local militias while pursuing Al Qaeda operatives and confronting other threats.

How long will the Pentagon get away with slapping the "war on terrorism" label on every harebrained and/or reckless thing they want to do?  It's bad enough that Don Rumsfeld has effectively acted as the de facto foreign minister of the United States for the last three years, since the 9/11 attacks.  Now, he has expanded power to finance armed foreign groups at his own discretion.

So far, Rummy's record in picking allies hasn't been so good.  In Afghanistan, he hadthe bright idea that we would, as John Kerry has phrased it on the campaign trail, subcontract the job of assaulting Bin Laden's hidout in the Battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan to local warlords.  As a result, one of the best chances the US will ever get to kill or capture Bin Laden and a number of his most experienced lieutenants at once was frittered away.

Then Rummy was convinced that con-man Ahmed Chalabi and his exile group the Iraqi National Congress was the best choice to head Iraq's government and airlifted them in early to bolster their chances and to finesse the State Department's skepticism about Chalabi.  Chalabi's men made up a significant part of the small crowd that was captured on camera cheering for the topping of Saddam's statue, while most of Baghdad was preparing for massive looting.

The State Department and the CIA were suspicious of Chalabi, who was convicted in absentia of embezzlement in Jordan, not least because he couldn't account for large sums of American money that he had been given to conduct anti-Saddam activities.  But, as we know from their management of the Halliburton sweetheart contracts, the Pentagon may isn't quite so scrupulous about accounting issues.  So what does Congress do?  Gives them new authority to dole out money to even more shady characters!

Then it turns out that Chalabi had essentially no base of support in Iraq.  Plus, there was that little matter about leaking highly-classified intelligence information to Iran.  But even now, some neoconservative ideologues are still true believers in Chalabi.  Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle, who has been one of Rummy's key advisers, is still griping that the only real mistake made in Iraq was not installing Chalabi right away.

All this has to be seen against the background of the deep, McCarthyist-type suspicions that many hawkish Republicans have of the CIA and the State Department as hotbeds of appeasement and treason.  See, for instance, my earlier post Pat Robertson Suggests Blowing Up State Department 10/11/03.  So, it's not surprising to read this in the Greg Miller article:

"In the right circumstances, like Iraq and Afghanistan, this makes sense," said one congressional official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "In the wrong circumstances it could lead us into some pretty bad stuff."

Current and former intelligence officials noted that military units were not subject to the same requirements as the CIA, which typically must secure a presidential directive before providing aid or arms to foreign groups. They also expressed concern that the measure could be a first step toward a more aggressive encroachment on CIA turf by the secretary of Defense and the military.

And Miller does a good job of explaining what some of the potential complications could be:

Col. Kathryn Stone, who was the senior legal advisor to commanders of the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan during the early part of the war, described one case in which a local warlord was making demands that the military couldn't meet.

The warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, had captured thousands of prisoners at Mazar-i-Sharif, and was willing to let U.S. forces screen them. In exchange, he wanted the U.S. to pay for cold-weather clothing and other gear for his soldiers, and for food for the prisoners.

When a special operations officer asked if the military could cut such a deal, "I had to tell this officer that we didn't have the fiscal authority to do that," Stone said. "I said, 'You need to go find your other government agency and see if they can help you out here.' " The term "other government agency," or OGA, commonly refers to CIA.

Stone said the Special Forces' new authority was "a great tool," but pointed to problems that had cropped up when the United States armed foreign groups in the past. American forces in Afghanistan confronted Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters who had been armed by the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, she said.

The article doesn't mention that the Uzbek warlord Dostum, who served as minister of interior (i.e., head of internal security) for one of the pro-Soviet Afghan governments, has a particular reputation for brutality.  He was implicated in the murder of a number of prisoners of war during the 2001 Afghan War.  His forces were in charge of the prisoners in the fortress who killed the CIA agent in a prison revolt, following which British and American forces killed most of the prisoners in retaking the fort.  John Walker Lindh was one of the survivors.  I've always assumed that Ashcroft agreed to plead that case out to avoid the inevitable scrutiny that a trial would have brought on the US' relations with the Afghan warlords, Dostum in particular.

So hearing that one of the virtues of the new law is that it would have made it easier to pump money to Rashid Dostum doesn't really increase my comfort level with the idea.

You might think, especially after the disaster of the Iraq War, that even a Republican Congress might be leery of giving new discretion to the Pentagon to conduct what could easily become rogue foreign policy operations.  But obviously, they were quite willing to do that.  Bush signed the bill into law this past Friday.