[pull quote: "As Rumsfeld's hatchetman, Cambone has
become so hated and feared inside the Pentagon that
one general told the Army Times: "If I had one round
left in my revolver, I'd take out Stephen Cambone"."
'Nuff said.]
http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair02072006.html
February 7, 2006
The Secret World of Stephen Cambone
Rumsfeld's Enforcer
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
The grave fellow in the business suit sitting between
two uniformed generals at the witness table during the
senate hearings about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners of
war at Abu Ghraib was Dr. Stephen Cambone, the
undersecretary of defense for intelligence, known
throughout the Pentagon as Donald Rumsfeld's "chief
henchman". In his testimony before the committee,
Cambone was unapologetic and almost as dismissive as
the ridiculous Sen. James Inhofe about the global
disgust which erupted over the abuse and murder of
Iraqi prisoners of war. Cambone, an apex neo-con and
veteran of the Project for the New American Century,
evinced disdain not only for the senatorial inquiry
but also at a squeamish Lieutenant General Antonio
Taguba, who sat next him, looking as if he suspected
that he might well be the next one leashed to
Cambone's bureaucratic pillory.
A Republican staffer on the Senate foreign relations
Committee tells CounterPunch the little-known Cambone,
who like so many others on the Bush war team
skillfully avoided military service, has quietly
become one of the most powerful men in the Pentagon,
rivaling even Paul Wolfowitz. "Cambone is a truly
dangerous player", the staffer said. "He is Rumsfeld's
guard dog, implacably loyal. While Wolfowitz positions
himself to step into the top spot should Rumsfeld get
axed, Cambone has dug in and gone to war against the
insurgents in the Pentagon. Cambone's fingerprints are
all over the occupation and the interrogation scandal.
For him, there's no turning back".
Cambone has stealthily positioned himself as the most
powerful intelligence operator in the Bush
administration. On May 8, 2003, Rumsfeld named him
Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, a new
position which Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz described thus: "The new office is in charge
of all intelligence and intelligence-related oversight
and policy guidance functions". In practice, this
means that Cambone controls the Defense Intelligence
Agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the
National Reconnaissance Organization, the National
Security Agency, the Defense Security Service and
Pentagon's Counter-Intelligence Field Activity.
Cambone meets with the heads of these agencies, as
well as top officials at the CIA and National Security
Council twice a week to give them their marching
orders.
One senate staffer tells us he has more operational
sway than George Tenet or Condi Rice. His rise to
power has been quiet, almost unnoticed until the Abu
Ghraib scandal forced him briefly into the spotlight.
Indeed, prior to the events of May, Cambone completely
evaded detection by Bob Woodward, who in two thick
volumes on Bush's wars failed to mention the name
Cambone once. Of course, this may reveal more about
Woodward than Cambone's skill at bureaucratic
camouflage.
Yes, Cambone has neo-con credentials. He got his
masters and doctorate at Claremont College in southern
California, an elite Straussian enclave. He went on to
draft sections of the Project for a New American
Century's 2001 Report, Rebuilding America's Defenses,
a document notable for recommending that the US
develop ethnic and race-based weapons. But more
crucial for the speedy trajectory of his career is
Cambone's resume as a devout Rumsfeldian. In 1998,
Rumsfeld selected Cambone to serve as staff director
of the Rumsfeld Commission on Ballistic Missile
Defense, the Congressionally-appointed panel which
justified implementation of the Strategic Defense
Initiative on the grounds that the US was vulnerable
to strikes from missiles freighting nuclear, chemical
and biological weapons launched by rogue nations, such
as North Korea, Iran and Iraq.
Cambone was no newcomer to the Star Wars scheme. From
1982 through 1986, he toiled at Los Alamos developing
policy papers about the need for space-based weapons.
In 1990, George Bush, Sr. picked Cambone to head up
the Strategic Defense Initiative Office at the
Pentagon. After Bush lost, Cambone migrated to the
Center for Strategic and International Studies, a DC
holding pen for hawks, where he continued to hammer
away in essays and speeches about the windows of
vulnerability in the skies over America.
Rumsfeld first brought Cambone into his inner circle
not as an overlord for intelligence, but as the chief
Pentagon strategist for pushing SDI through Congress.
Recall that in the early days of the Bush
administration, Star Wars and the obliteration of the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty were the twin obsessions
of the Rumsfeld gang at the Pentagon.
After 9/11 Rumsfeld moved Cambone over to work on war
planning and intelligence as Deputy Secretary of
Defense for Policy, where he labored under the neo-con
luminary Douglas Feith. There's reason to believe that
Cambone's real mission was to keep tabs on Feith, a
notorious hothead and Cheney loyalist whom Rumsfeld
distrusts. Rumsfeld wasn't the only one who loathed
Feith. Gen. Tommy Franks, who commanded the Afghan and
Iraq wars, told Woodward that Feith was "the stupidest
motherfucker on the face of the Earth".
Cambone and Feith reportedly soon developed an equally
acrimonious relationship. But as Feith's star fell,
Cambone's rose. In July 2002, Rumsfeld moved Cambone
to the Office of Analysis and Evaluation, where his
mission was to implement Rumsfeld's plan to reorganize
the military and trim some of its most highly-prized
weapons systems. "Cambone loomed as a huge threat to
the generals", a senate staffer told us. "The message
was pretty simple. Go along with our war plans or risk
losing your big-ticket items and perhaps your command.
Cambone was the enforcer". At the Pentagon, the most
feared weapon isn't a dirty nuke, but a line item in
the budget.
In April of 2003, Rumsfeld placed Cambone in charge of
counter-terrorism teams operating under the code-name
"Grey Fox". This covert operation is a kind of
sabotage and assassination squad run out of the civil
wing of the Pentagon. Rumsfeld had grown frustrated
with the military's reluctance to assassinate
suspected al-Qaeda and Iraqi resistance leaders, an
understandable reluctance in light of US executive
orders restricting the use of assassinations. So
Rumsfeld seized control of the hit teams from the
generals and assigned it to Cambone, a civilian
appointee with no military experience. The Gray Fox
project, so one Washington Post report concluded, is
geared to perform "deep penetration" missions in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Syria and North Korea,
setting up listening posts, conducting acts of
sabotage and assassination. When questioned about Gray
Fox, Cambone snapped, "We won't talk about those
things".
However, military officers did talk about Gray Fox.
"The people in these units are available 24 hours a
day, seven days a week, anywhere around the world.
They are very highly trained, with specialized skills
for dealing with close-quarters combat and unique
situations posed by weapons of mass destruction", a
military officer told Army Times. "If we find a
high-value target somewhere, anywhere in the world,
and if we have the forces to get there and get to
them, we should get there and get to them", the
official said. "Right now, there are 18 food chains,
20 levels of paperwork and 22 hoops we have to jump
through before we can take action. Our enemy moves
faster than that".
Aside from guarding Rumsfeld from assaults from within
the Pentagon, Cambone's main role seems to be cutting
through red tape and bothersome codes of conduct, such
as the Geneva Conventions, to institute legally
questionable policies. Take the treatment of Iraqi
prisoners. The orders to soften up Iraqi prisoners for
intelligence interrogators (both military and private
contractors) came directly from Cambone's office.
In August 2003, as the occupation of Iraq began to
turn bloody, Cambone ordered Brigadier General
Geoffrey Miller, former commander of the detention
facility at Guantanamo, to go to Iraq along with a
team of experienced military interrogators, who had
honed their inquisitorial skills with the torture of
al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees captured in
Afghanistan. His instructions were to "Gitmoize" the
interrogations at Abu Ghraib and other prisons,
including the notorious Camp Cropper on the outskirts
of the Baghdad Airport, where the Delta Force
conducted abusive interrogations of top level members
of Saddam's regime.
Cambone's top deputy inside the military is none other
than Lt. General William Boykin, the Christian
warrior, whom Cambone and Rumsfeld elevated to the
position to the position of intelligence czar for the
US Army last fall. Boykin rose to this lofty eminence
after he went on a revival tour of evangelical
churches in Oregon, where he disclosed the top secret
intelligence that the US "had been attacked because we
are a Christian nation". Boykin also leaked the news
that Bush's war on terrorism was actually "a war
against Satan".
Boykin calmed the congregations by saying there was
little reason to fear because the Christian god is
mightier than Allah. "I know that my god is bigger
than his", Boykin preached. "I know that my god is a
real God and his an idol". The general also revealed
to the faithful that the supreme deity of the
Christians had hand-picked Bush to be president during
these fraught times. It was obvious, the general
reasoned, that Bush didn't win the election. He became
president through a kind of preemptive strike by the
Almighty.
When word of Boykin's sermons landed on the front page
of the Los Angeles Times in October of 2003, there was
outrage in the American Islamic community that this
two-star zealot was now directing US military
intelligence operations in the Middle East. There were
calls for his ouster and the Inspector General of the
Army launched an investigation of Boykin. But Rumsfeld
and Cambone shrugged off the probe and stood by
Boykin.
It now turns out that Boykin, the Islamophobe, played
a central role in the torture scandal now gripping the
Bush administration. Last summer, Boykin briefed
Cambone on a list of no-holds-barred interrogation
methods that he thought should be used to extract more
information from Iraqi detainees.
These included humiliation, sleep deprivation,
restraint, water torture, religious taunting, light
deprivation, and other techniques of torture that have
since come to light. A few weeks after this crucial
meeting in June, Cambone sent General Miller to Iraq
with instructions to oversee the implementation of the
Boykin interrogation plan in order to "rapidly exploit
internees for actionable intelligence". According to
Lt. General Antonio Taguba, who investigated the
abuses at Abu Ghraib, Miller then instructed the
Military Police to become "actively engaged in setting
the conditions for successful exploitation of
internees". The grim trio of Cambone, Boykin and
Miller also conspired to put the control of the
detention facilities in Iraq under the tactical
control of military intelligence. At Abu Ghraib, the
job fell to Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the
205th Military Intelligence Brigade, a move that Lt.
General Taguba called contrary to established military
doctrine.
It now seems likely that Cambone was only the one to
invite Israeli advice (and perhaps interrogators) on
how to extract information from Iraqi detainees.
Before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Cambone freely
admitted to the Washington Times that he was taking
advice from the Israelis and sharing intelligence with
them on the mechanics of occupation and interrogation.
"Those who have to deal with like problems tend to
share information as best they can".
These days advancement through the ranks of the
Pentagon often goes hand-in-hand with opportunities to
deliver sweetheart deals to corporate allies. Here too
Cambone has not disappointed his backers. From 1986 to
1990, Cambone worked as a top lobbyist for SRS, a
murky software company with deep roots in the Pentagon
and CIA. Although Cambone left SRS for government
work, he didn't forget his old employers. With
Cambone's approval, the Pentagon awarded SRS a $6
million contract to provide management support for the
Missile Defense Agency, the wing of the Defense
Department charged with managing the SDI program and
the development of space-base weapons.
In addition, SRS benefited from Cambone's transfer to
the spying wing of the Pentagon. An SRS subsidiary
called Torch Concepts was hired by the Pentagon to
conduct a data mining foray into passenger records of
JetBlue airlines. Bart Edsall, SRS's vice-president,
described the work Torch did this way: "the company
got a contract from the Pentagon to work with the Army
to ferret information out of data streams [in an
effort to detect] abnormal behavior of secretive
people". Sound familiar? It should. The scheme was
essentially a privatized version of the kind of work
that John Poindexter wanted to conduct with his
discredited Total Information Awareness operation. No
surprise that the contracts for this outsourced form
of snooping should fall to SRS. It is already the
primary private contractor working with the
Information Awareness Office of DARPA, the agency
which Poindexter ruled and which continues the
nefarious work of prying into the private lives,
including travel, health and financial records, of
American citizens.
As Rumsfeld's hatchetman, Cambone has become so hated
and feared inside the Pentagon that one general told
the Army Times: "If I had one round left in my
revolver, I'd take out Stephen Cambone". This raises
the concept of fragging to an entirely new level.
This essay is excerpted from Jeffrey St. Clair's new
book, Grand Theft Pentagon.
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