In this issue:

Senate Threatens Subpoenas of Bush Administration Documents

Probes Force Perle To Quit Defense Panel

Pentagon Criminal Probe of Halliburton

House Committees Reject Plame Inquiry

Levin Letter: Administration Withheld Intel From UN

From Volume 3, Issue Number 9 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Mar. 2, 2004

United States News Digest

Senate Threatens Subpoenas of Bush Administration Documents

The Senate Intelligence Committee voted Feb. 26, on a bipartisan basis in closed session, to initiate steps which are likely to result in a subpoena to the Bush Administration for documents on pre-war Iraq intelligence.

According to a report in the Feb. 27 New York Times, the committee set a three-week deadline for voluntary compliance, and will then take "further action." Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), the ranking Democrat on the committee, said: "We need these things, we want them, and if we don't get them, we will resort to other means," which can only mean a subpoena, says the Times. The committee approved a plan under which Senators Pat Roberts (R-Kans), the committee chairman, and Rockefeller will issue a letter to President Bush with an explicit warning, if the documents are not provided. Among documents sought, are copies of President's daily intelligence briefings—which have also been a subject of much contention with the 9/11 Commission.

In early November, shortly after Roberts and Rockefeller had sent strongly worded letters to the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department, demanding documents, the Republican leadership, acting at the behest of Vice President Cheney, shut down the investigation.

The investigation was put on ice for several months. Then, on Feb. 12, Roberts and Rockefeller announced that the committee was proceeding, and was in fact expanding its investigation to include information provided by Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, and to probe the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group.

Probes Force Perle To Quit Defense Panel

In a Feb. 18 letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, leading neo-con manipulator of the Bush Presidency and architect of the Iraq war, tendered his resignation from the Defense Policy Board. Now, Perle, a top ally of Vice President Dick Cheney and advocate of preventive nuclear war, may be brought to justice, along with Cheney and the rest of the neo-con cabal.

In March 2003, the New Yorker published an article by Seymour Hersh titled "Lunch with the Chairman" which exposed the activities of a company created after 9/11 called Trireme Partners; Perle was one of the principals. Other articles reported that Perle was being paid hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of dollars for private business deals related to the topics he took up at the DPB, with access to classified materials. Perle's associates in Trireme include two other DPB members: Henry Kissinger and Gerald Hillman.

Concerns about Perle have multiplied since the March 2003 Hersh piece. These include:

—Did Trireme receive a $20-million investment from Boeing? Competing to beat out Airbus for contracts for the refueling tankers for the U.S. Air Force, Boeing paid millions to Defense Department advisory personnel for help in pushing the contract through. Perle got a $20-million investment promise from Boeing for Trireme (it actually received a few million). In August 2003, Perle wrote an op-ed defending the Boeing tanker deal, as it was being questioned by Congress. Some top Boeing executives were fired and forced to resign in a probe of DOD officials passing internal memos and information to Boeing. A larger investigation continues. Perle denies that his op-ed praising the tanker deal was solicited and paid for by Boeing.

—Trireme Partners received up to $14.5 million from Hollinger International, while Conrad Black was in control of the Board of Directors, paid both directly to Trireme and through Gerald Hillman's Hillman Partners. Conrad Black's decisions to make investments and payouts are being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and are the subject of a lawsuit that just blocked Black from selling his share in the company.

—Perle gave paid briefings on "axis of evil" countries to Goldman Sachs on the topic, "Implications of an Imminent War: Iraq Now, North Korea Next?" Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich) asked the DOD to investigate whether this constituted a conflict of interest; no conflict was found, based on the technicality that Perle did not work for the U.S. government for the required 60 days a year to justify a "conflict of interest." Conyers is pursuing a change in the law.

—The $125,000 payment from the bankrupt telecom giant Global Crossing for Perle to help them overcome Defense Department objections, on the grounds of national security concerns. Perle was to have gotten a bonus of $600,000 if he succeeded. Perle pulled out of the deal, and said he donated the money to charity, when the contract was exposed, and a letter to Global Crossing came to light promoting him as a member of the Defense Policy Board.

—Consorting with terrorists—i.e., the Mujahadin E-Khalq, at a Jan. 24, 2004 fundraising event, allegedly to help Iranian earthquake victims. Perle would not say how much he was paid, and said that he didn't know the organizers were connected to the MEK, even though he's a terrorism expert, by self-description; and even though Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio) had asked the Justice Department to stop the event from taking place. The Washington Post reported on Jan. 29, "FBI agents attended it [the rally] and as part of a continuing investigation, the Treasury Department on Monday froze the assets of the event's prime organizer...."

Add to all that, Perle's role in promoting Ahmed Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress flooded the Pentagon's rogue war-rooms with false intelligence.

Perle wrote a Feb. 18, 2004 letter to Rumsfeld which says, "I would not wish those views [referring to his more extremist neo-con positions] to be attributed to you or the President at any time, and especially not during a Presidential campaign." In typical Perle style, his resignation announcement was released with a threat from his attorney that he is now "free" to sue those who accused him of conflict of interest. For the last year, Jack Shafer of the online magazine Slate has run a weekly column called "Perle Libel Watch," pointing out that Perle has not made good on his threat to sue Seymour Hersh in British court. Shafer says Perle has 14 days until his window to sue expires, and they are still counting.

Pentagon Criminal Probe of Halliburton

The Defense Department said Feb. 23 that the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS), an arm of the Pentagon Inspector General's office, is investigating allegations of fraud, including overpricing of fuel delivered to Iraq, by Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) subsidiary. A spokeswoman for Halliburton denied that the company had committed any wrongdoing, maintaining that all of its dealings have been in line with U.S. law, including those in Nigeria and Iran, except for a couple of employees who may have been involved in kickbacks to a Kuwaiti subcontractor.

According to a Jan. 16 letter from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif), the Inspector General's staff had told him and other Congressmen, that the IG had referred the matter to the DCIS for criminal investigation on Jan. 15, the day after the Defense Contract Audit Agency had referred the matter to the IG.

In a new letter Feb. 24, Waxman and Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich) requested that the IG also investigate the waiver given to KBE by the Army Corps of Engineers on Dec. 19, which declared that the prices charged by Halliburton were "fair and reasonable" and waived the requirement that KBR provide cost and pricing data justifying the high fuel prices. Waxman said that this may have been granted under false pretenses, particularly false statements regarding Kuwaiti laws.

Further, Waxman says that the Defense Department IG has asked that the State Department Inspector General provide investigators to assist in the investigation. They will be investigating actions of U.S. embassy personnel in connection with the Halliburton contract.

House Committees Reject Plame Inquiry

A major attempt by House Democrats to force Congressional oversight of the Bush White House came to naught Feb. 25, when three House committees rejected a resolution of inquiry demanding documents from the Executive Branch relating to the exposure of undercover CIA employee Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. It was Wilson who, in July 2003, wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times that allegations that Iraq had tried to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger were a fraud. Shortly after his op-ed was published, columnist Robert Novak revealed that he had been told by two senior White House officials that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and that that must have had something to do with why Wilson was the one sent by the CIA to investigate the Niger claims.

The resolution of inquiry, introduced into the House on Jan. 21 by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), quickly gained 73 co-sponsors, and was referred to the Intelligence, Judiciary, International Relations and Armed Services Committees. The House Intelligence Committee on Feb. 3 voted 10 to 3 against reporting it favorably to the floor, and the other three committees all followed suit on Feb. 27.

During the Judiciary Committee mark-up, committee chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc) argued that a parallel Congressional inquiry could substantially impact the grand jury investigation being conducted by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Invoking the image of the Iran-Contra investigation, Sensenbrenner warned that "when Congress decides to engage in a political sideshow, rather than allowing a criminal prosecution" to reach a conclusion, "There is a possibility, and, perhaps, even a probability, that a guilty person can go free" (as happened, for example, with Oliver North, whose immunized testimony before Congress ultimately led to the overturning of his criminal conviction).

The Committee's Democrats rejected the notion that Congress cannot conduct its own inquiry while an Executive Branch investigation is under way. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) charged that the White House is engaged in a coverup and warned that "if we reject this resolution, we risk sending the message that members of Congress are complicit in working with the Administration on a coverup." Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) noted that, during the previous Administration, the Republican-controlled Congress was quick to jump on any allegation made against the President and never hesitated to launch an investigation, to the point of impeaching him for his personal sexual conduct. "Yet, when we seek to find the truth that bears upon the potential, if you will, loss of life of an undercover CIA agent, also impacting on how we treat other CIA agents, we cannot find, not one committee, that is willing to do its duty."

The Democrats repeatedly made the point that Congress has an oversight responsibility of the Executive Branch and that the leaking of Plame's identity came in the context of a war launched against Iraq on the basis of fake intelligence, some of which had been exposed by Plame's husband.

Levin Letter: Administration Withheld Intel From UN

In a floor statement on Feb. 23, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich) blasted National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice and CIA Director George Tenet for misleading the Senate on March 6, 2003, by telling Levin and other Senators that the U.S. had provided all the necessary "high-probability" information on suspected weapons sites, to the United Nations weapons inspectors, UNMOVIC, and IAEA.

A letter received by Levin from the CIA on Jan. 20, 2004, ten months after the Iraq war was launched, and four months after Levin requested the information, now shows that the U.S. withheld the necessary information from the UN Security Council and from the inspectors.

Levin says that if Tenet had answered honestly that 21 sites had not been shared with the UN, "it could have put an obstacle in the path of the Administration's move to end UN inspections and proceed to war.... [H]onest answers by Director Tenet might have undermined the false sense of urgency for proceeding to war and could have contributed to delay ... of military action."

He reiterates that this letter, a "small part of the picture," shows that "an independent commission must be appointed by Congress—not just by the President," and that it must look at not just how intelligence was flawed, "but how that flawed intelligence came to be further exaggerated by the Administration in order to support its decision to initiate military action."

Levin released the letter into the Senate record.

EIRNS learned this week that Levin has initiated a staff investigation by the his Democratic Party staffers on the Armed Service Committee, into the Administration's false statements used to justify the war, and to manipulate elected officials to vote for that war based on briefings of an urgent, imminent, etc., danger. After committee chairman John Warner (R-Va) ignored Levin's request for an investigation, Levin began a probe of "thousands of documents," and interviews with officials involved in the intelligence process on Iraq, according to a press release on his website.

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