[iwar] [fc:Inside.The.Secret.War.Council]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-08-19 06:22:58
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 06:22:58 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Inside.The.Secret.War.Council]
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Time
August 26, 2002
Inside The Secret War Council
How an unpaid conservative board that holds private meetings and puts
nothing in writing gets heard at the Pentagon
By Mark Thompson, Washington
If you could slip past the soldiers toting M-16s at the door, the Pentagon's
17 miles of corridors might remind you a little of an inner-city apartment
building: every other door is plastered with alarms, fortified latches and
ugly combination locks. You would buzz past signs bearing mysterious
acronyms - WELCOME ABOARD J3/SMOO - that blur rather than clarify what's
cooking behind those doors. Asked what goes on inside, officers get that
"Don't ask, don't tell" look - and don't even reply.
So it was alarming when one secret agency's work spilled into the open
recently, only to be dismissed by almost everyone involved. Meeting last
month in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's private conference room, a
group called the Defense Policy Board heard an outside expert, armed only
with a computerized PowerPoint briefing, denounce the Saudis for being
"active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers,
from cadre to foot soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader." Such claims
have been on the rise since Sept. 11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers were
Saudis. Relatives of those killed in the attacks filed suit last week
seeking $1 trillion from, among others, three Saudi princes who allegedly
gave money to groups supporting the terrorists. But the Pentagon briefer's
solution to the Saudi problem was provocative in the extreme: Washington
should declare the Saudis the enemy, he said, and threaten to take over the
oil wells if the kingdom doesn't do more to combat Islamic terrorism. "I
thought the briefing was ridiculous," a board member said, "a waste of time,
and the quicker he left the better." When the briefing leaked to the press,
it sent diplomatic tremors ricocheting to Riyadh.
This is the kind of outside-the-Pentagon-box thinking that routinely takes
place inside the Defense Policy Board, the Secretary's private think tank in
a building where helmets often trump thinking caps. Chaired by Richard Perle
- a Reagan Pentagon official whose hard-line views won him the title "Prince
of Darkness"--the board gives its 31 unpaid members something every
Washington player wants: unrivaled access without accountability. Perle uses
his post as a springboard for his unilateralist, attack-Iraq views to try to
whip the Bush Administration into action. But despite its name, the board
does not make policy. As the Saudi episode shows, it can do something far
scarier: give a false impression of it.
That wasn't the point when the Pentagon set up the board in 1985 to advise
the Defense Secretary on key issues of the day. Unlike many of the
department's ancillary agencies, it toils in the shadows. Its classified
sessions combine outsiders' briefings with internal discussions on military
deep-think. Is the Pentagon buying the right weapons? Is the U.S. cozying up
to the right nations? Is the U.S. military pivoting properly in the wake of
Sept. 11? Each member's access to top-secret U.S. intelligence gives the
board's opinions a cachet not enjoyed by Washington's public think tanks,
which churn out reports on such topics.
Beneath the brass plating, the board's impact is harder to discern. Though
its quarterly, two-day sessions take place in Rumsfeld's inner sanctum, the
board's two full-time employees run the operation from another floor. Perle
sets the agenda and briefers. The members take no votes, do not strive to
reach a consensus and write no reports. Instead, they wrap up each session
sharing what they have learned with Rumsfeld, who is free to ignore what he
is told.
Rumsfeld has given some of the Republican right's most outspoken (and
forsaken) hawks a place to nest. Among them: former Vice President Dan
Quayle, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and ex-CIA and Pentagon boss
James Schlesinger. True, there are also centrist Republican members, like
Henry Kissinger. But the board has an undeniably hard-nosed tilt: seven of
the 31 members have ties to the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. Previous boards had at least a few members with views sharply
opposed to the incumbent Administration - Perle was on the board through
Clinton's two terms - but this one lacks Democratic firepower. The
sprinkling of Democrats includes token moderates and those, like former CIA
chief James Woolsey, who are hawks within their own party.
In effect, the board has become Perle's podium. It rarely achieved any
notice before he assumed the chairmanship last year, but now his position
there lends weight to his public pronouncements. His recent column in the
London Daily Telegraph titled "Why the West Must Strike First Against Saddam
Hussein" identified him as "chairman of the Defence Policy Board."
But board members, serving at Rumsfeld's pleasure, are like a choir
preaching to the pastor. The board "is just another p.r. shop for Rumsfeld,"
says Michael O'Hanlon, a defense expert with the Brookings Institution. "It
gives his ideas more currency." O'Hanlon admits, though, that he would "jump
at the chance" to serve on it for the access to the nation's top Defense
officials. But Lawrence Korb, a Reagan-era Pentagon official, thinks the
board is "a net loss for the Administration because many people think it
represents the Administration's views."
That's why when Perle invited Laurent Murawiec, a senior Rand Corp. analyst,
to give a briefing on the kingdom, it stirred up such a fuss. "I didn't know
what he was going to say, but he had done some serious research on Saudi
Arabia," Perle told TIME. In fact, Murawiec's work for Rand has not focused
on Saudi Arabia.
Perle's ignorance of Murawiec's talking points matched his unfamiliarity
with his briefer's past. Back in the 1980s, Murawiec worked for political
extremist and perpetual presidential aspirant Lyndon LaRouche as an editor
of LaRouche's magazine, Executive Intelligence Review. By the end of last
week, LaRouche was denouncing both his former associate and "suspected
Israeli agent Richard Perle" for pushing the U.S. toward war with the
Islamic world.
None of Murawiec's arguments were relayed to Rumsfeld, Perle said last week
from his vacation home in France. While Perle considers such unvarnished
views important "to stimulate discussion," he points out that the board also
received a more mainline briefing from U.S. intelligence officials.
When the substance of Murawiec's briefing leaked to the Washington Post,
U.S. officials tried to pretend it had never happened. Rumsfeld dismissed it
as the musings of "a French national, a resident alien," and Secretary of
State Colin Powell phoned the Saudi Foreign Minister to calm down his
government. Rand issued a statement distancing itself from its analyst's
comments. Murawiec wasn't talking.
Rumsfeld made clear last week that despite the Saudi embarrassment, he
values the board's advice. "I have always benefited from a competition of
ideas," he said. But in a Pentagon known for marching in lockstep to
Rumsfeld's orders, the surreal Saudi briefing left some thinking that
Perle's board should focus next on picking its targets - and the weapons
used against them - more wisely. 

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