Consulting and policy overlap for Pentagon advisor
In February, the Defense Policy Board, a group of outside advisors to the Pentagon, got a classified presentation from the super-secret Defense Intelligence Agency on crises in North Korea and Iraq.

Three weeks later, the then-chairman of the board, Richard N. Perle, offered a briefing of his own at a Goldman Sachs investment seminar on ways to profit from possible conflicts with both countries.

Perle and his fellow advisors also heard a classified address about high-tech military communications systems at the same closed-door session in February. He runs a venture capital firm that has been exploring investments in that very area.

The disclosures in recently released board agendas and investment documents are the latest illustrations of how Perle’s private consulting and investment interests overlap with his role on the board, which advises the Secretary of Defense.

Perle resigned as board chairman on Mar. 27 after reports were published revealing that he had been employed as a consultant by bankrupt telecommunications firm Global Crossing Ltd., which was trying to get Pentagon clearance to be sold to Asian investors. The reports also had him soliciting investment money from a Saudi who was seeking to influence US policy on Iraq.

Perle still remains on the board as a member, serves on the board of several defense contractors and is a lead player in Trireme Partners, a venture capital fund seeking investments in the defense and homeland security industries. (Los Angeles Times)

US signs deal with terror group
On Apr. 15 US forces in Iraq signed a ceasefire agreement with an Iranian opposition group that the United States lists as a terrorist organization, a surprise move that has greatly concerned officials in Britain and outraged leaders in Iran.

The decision to cease hostilities with the People’s Mujahidin (MKO), an armed group of secular Iranian dissidents that has been fighting Tehran’s fundamentalist regime from inside Iraq for more than 20 years, is the first accord between the US and a listed terrorist organization.

The move by America is at odds with the Bush administration’s pledge to fight terrorist groups worldwide.

The MKO was formed in the 1960s and was expelled from Iran after the Islamic revolution in 1979. It formed an alliance with Saddam Hussein, who backed the group.

Only two weeks ago, US forces in northern Iraq bombed the MKO’s main base along the Iranian border, killing scores of fighters and destroying tanks and artillery.

The MKO, which has conducted bombings and assassinations against Iran’s leaders, also has a history of violence against Americans. It supported the takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and killed several US military and civilian officials in the 1970s. But the group developed allies in the US Congress for its opposition to Iranian fundamentalism.

“In the wake of the terrorist attacks in the US, Washington was portraying itself as anti-terrorist, but it entered into a deal with a terrorist group which they have nurtured and given a safe haven in Washington,” stated the head of Iran’s powerful expediency council.

Last Thursday, George W. Bush told the American people that the military victories in Iraq were just one part of his administration’s longer and broader “war on terror.” (Guardian UK, Times UK)

Dangerous patients roam Baghdad’s streets
More than 100 criminally psychotic patients are roaming Baghdad after looters ransacked the city’s only mental hospital, stealing even the metal doors from patients’ barred cells in the high-security unit.

One nurse told how she had found two whimpering patients on the grounds after they hadbeen raped by marauders who stripped the hospital of beds, equipment, and medicines. Four other women were raped after joining the hundreds of patients who either escaped or were released from al-Rashad mental teaching hospital by staff unable to treat them in a building devoid of “everything except the ceilings and walls.”

Walking around the high-walled unit patients deemed criminally psychotic — which had held 110 patients including rapists, murderers, sex criminals, and those deemed to have “antisocial” or “anti-governmental” delusions — Amir Abu Heelo, the hospital’s director, commented: “We don’t know where they are now. They are a danger to themselves and the community.”

Only 300 of the hospital’s more than 1,000 patients remain.

Relatives of released patients plead with medical staff to take them back. Pointing to his schizophrenic brother, Haider, 38, Kareem Hamza Hamoodi said: “He has tried to burn down our house four times since he came home. We can’t control him.”

The doctors refused to take him back, saying that Haider would escape. (Times UK)

Report :Pentagon dominates US foreign policy with dubious intelligence
US insistence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction is based on dubious intelligence from a shadowy Pentagon committee that now dominates US foreign policy, according to The New Yorker magazine.

Present and former CIA officials, quoted in The New York Times and The New Yorker, claimed that a small number of powerful neo-conservative ideologues in the Pentagon were so determined to prove the existence of a banned weapons program and links to al-Qaida that they manipulated intelligence.

According to a report written by veteran New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), the brainchild of US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, relied on questionable intelligence from the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi.

“You had to treat them with suspicion. The INC has a track record of manipulating intelligence because it has an agenda. It’s a political unit, not an intelligence agency,” a former senior CIA official specializing in the Middle East said in the article.

Hersh reported that intelligence gathered by the OSP drove the war agenda, often in the face of evidence that it was either unreliable or false. The OSP reported to Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defense Secretary and a leading proponent of the war.

One former CIA official told Hersh: “One of the reasons I left was my sense that they (OSP) were using the intelligence from the CIA and other agencies only when it fits their agenda. They didn’t like the intelligence they were getting and so they brought people in to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with ... as if they were on a mission from God. If it doesn’t fit their theory, they don’t want to accept it.”

W. Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence agency, told Nicholas Kristof, of The New York Times, that when experts wrote reports skeptical about the existence of weapons of mass destruction “they were encouraged to think it over again.”

Lang told the New Yorker that the OSP’s influence has spread beyond Iraq.

“The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off,” he said.

By late last year, the OSP had grown to become George W. Bush’s main intelligence source. (AFP, Times UK)

Putin: We are not with you and we don’t believe you
British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s first public attempt to heal the diplomatic wounds of the Iraq war suffered a humiliating rebuff last Wednesday when Russian president Vladimir Putin refused to lift UN sanctions and mocked the possibility that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq.

Putin also clashed with Blair by demanding UN weapons inspectors be allowed back into Iraq and challenged Blair’s vision of a new world strategic partnership, arguing it would be unacceptable for the US to dominate the international community.

The public dressing down for Blair came during a 63-minute press conference staged by the two men at Putin’s private residence outside Moscow.

Blair had been hoping to persuade Russia to agree to the US demand to lift the sanctions.

But Putin said Russia and its partners “believe until clarity is achieved over whether weapons of mass destruction exist in Iraq, sanctions should be kept in place.” Almost mocking Blair, he went on: “Where is Saddam? Where are those arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, if indeed they ever existed? Perhaps Saddam is still hiding somewhere in a bunker underground, sitting on cases of weapons of mass destruction and is preparing to blow the whole thing up and bring down the lives of thousands of Iraqi people.”

He added that sanctions could not be lifted since they had been introduced because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. “It is only the [UN] Security Council that is in a position to lift those sanctions. After all, they introduced them.”

He also derided Blair’s talk of a new world order, saying: “If the decision-making process in such a framework is democratic, then that is something we could agree with, but if decisions are being made by just one member of the international community and all the others are required to support them, that is something we could not find acceptable.” (Guardian UK)

US troops face war crimes allegations
A group of Iraqis will file a war crimes case against the commander of US-led forces in Iraq, General Tommy Franks, their lawyer said on Tues., Apr. 29.

“There are 19 victims of the war so far that have come forward to back the case,” lawyer Jan Fermon said.

He said the claim, to be filed May 13, would name Franks and unspecified American troops.

Fermon claimed there were 17 “specific incidents” in which US soldiers and commanders violated the 1993 Belgian war crimes law.

The case includes allegations that US troops failed to prevent the looting of hospitals in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Another claim involves the US bombing in late March of a crowded market in northwest Baghdad which killed more than 60 people.

After the claim is filed, a Brussels investigative magistrate will study the allegations to decide whether a case can be opened against Franks and others.

Fermon said he was optimistic his claim would be accepted. “We have a very specific case, with specific evidence,” he said. “I do not see how they can reject it.”

Evidence in the claim, including video footage and interviews, was gathered by two Belgian doctors stationed in Baghdad. (AP)

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