Dark side to US intelligence reform (smirk's private army of spies)

[donsu]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FL03Aa01.html

While the media focus attention on congressional turf battles associated with intelligence reform, US President George W Bush is taking steps - largely under the public's radar screen - to create his own hidden "army" of covert spies.

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While this unseemly wrangling about political power makes headlines, the White House has set in motion by presidential fiat other, more questionable changes to existing intelligence structures. For example, Bush has directed a study that will propose ways to increase the Defense Department's role in covert operations, a realm that heretofore was the domain of the CIA's Directorate of Operations. The study, due in February, is exploring the feasibility of turning over control of paramilitary operations to the 50,000-strong United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) based in Florida. (Again, this was recommended by the 9-11 Commission.) Given USSOCOM's much larger size, the obvious concern is that a president would be tempted to initiate many more covert operations - and as commander-in-chief, do so without informing the relevant committees of Congress as the CIA director must do now. Conceivably, this would give the executive branch a "private army" for pursuing its policy of preventive war.

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The other, unremarked factor in the mix is the Pentagon's transformation effort, especially its view of future threats - all based on intelligence - and its corresponding responses. Moving further from the Cold War-era concentration on traditional war plans to counter the Warsaw Pact, military planners are developing responses to what they call "irregular" (eg, Afghanistan and Iraq), "catastrophic" (nuclear, chemical, biological weapon use), and "disruptive" (unanticipated advances in manipulating cyberspace) scenarios. If this is to be more than a public-relations effort, it will require great attention from Pentagon civilians, attention they can ill afford to waste on a turf struggle.

The White House, which was never enamored of the 9-11 Commission or its recommendations, may simply ignore Congress and press its own "remedies" through presidential directives. That would relegate "intelligence reform" to the same category that wags assign "military intelligence": an oxymoron.
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the people of the world should pay close attention to these doings of the bloody hands bushgang. the bushgang's gaze could be on your country next.