- Intelligence "cooking" and retaliation also
plagues IMINT (Imagery intelligence) community but with a healthy dose
of contract fraud. WMR has already reported on tainted intelligence being
created on the orders of the Bush administration in the SIGINT (signals
intelligence) and HUMINT (human intelligence) communities. Largely ignored
has been the effect of this policy in the IMINT (imagery intelligence)
community. IMINT analysts carefully scan spy satellite and air reconnaissance
photos taken of foreign airfields, weapons labs, shipyards, government
office complexes, and other strategic and tactical sites.
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- MZM, the company involved in paying bribes to former
California GOP Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham, was also
part of the cooking of intelligence on Iraq years prior to the US invasion,
according to a former weapons expert at the National Ground Intelligence
Center (NGIC) in Charlottesville, Virginia. MZM was sold by owner Mitchell
Wade to Veritas Capital and is now known as Athena Innovative Solutions,
Inc.
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- According to a former IMINT and weapons analyst, who
worked since 1988 for various intelligence agencies looking closely at
Iraq, NGIC, which is comprised of US Army Intelligence and Security Command
(INSCOM) intelligence analysts and personnel detailed from the National
Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), had an all-too-cozy relationship
with MZM. The firm's single source, non-competitive contract with NGIC
paved the way for the cooking of some of the intelligence used to justify
the invasion of Iraq.
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- After NGIC's deputy director, Bill Rich, Sr., retired,
he was quickly hired by MZM, which had replaced Battelle as the prime contractor
for NGIC. Soon after taking the job with MZM, Rich's son, who had no prior
intelligence experience, was also hired by MZM, according to the former
analyst. In addition, NGIC's retired Sergeant Major was also hired by the
firm, according to the same source. The links between MZM and Cunningham
were so close, members of Wade's family also reportedly steered money to
Duke Cunningham's campaign coffers.
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- Since the MZM-Cunningham scandal broke, the firm has
been cut off from all work at NGIC. However, according to NGIC sources
that has not affected Rich, who continues to work for a new NGIC contractor,
Sparta, Inc., which, like MZM, is conveniently located in the University
of Virginia Research Park, across the street from NGIC.
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- The weapons analyst said that NGIC purposely altered
figures on the number of Russian helicopters in order to justify the Crusade
gun system, which, the the time, was being built by United Defense, which,
in turn, was owned by The Carlyle Group. After the analyst objected to
the inflation by NGIC management of the numbers of working helicopters
in Russia, he found himself subject to a security clearance investigation
by US Investigations Services (USIS), a firm in which the Carlyle Group
has a major financial stake, USIS's Iraq operations were under investigation
by US Army Col. Ted Westhusing last June. During that investigation, Westhusing
was reported to have shot himself in the head while in a trailer near Baghdad.
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- In a manner reminiscent of how the National Security
Agency (NSA) treats whistleblowers, the NGIC analyst was forced to see
the center's sole psychologist, someone who was on good terms with Deputy
Director Bill Rich. The psychologist determined that the analyst suffered
from a psychiatric problem even though his own HMO contradicted that evaluation.
In June 2001, the analyst had his security clearance revoked and was terminated
in 2002.
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- In August 2001, the analyst arranged to have some of
his NGIC paperwork sent to him at home by NGIC security. However, when
a clasped and taped enveloped arrived at his home, there were clear indications
that sometime during the passage of the documents through four levels of
NGIC management, including NGIC security, something was inserted into the
files: a SECRET NOFORN WINTEL document [NOFORN is "no foreign dissemination"
and WINTEL is "Warning - Intelligence Sources and Methods Revealed'].
The analyst dutifully informed the FBI and the Army Criminal Investigation
Division (CID) at Fort Monroe, Virginia about the incident. However, the
analyst was never asked to sign his statement about the incident. This
is eerily similar to the planting of two boxes of classified documents
in the home of former NSA analyst Kenneth Ford, who is currently on trial
after being charged with the possession of classified material.
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- NGIC -- The Intelligence Cooking Kitchen
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- The intelligence cooking on Russian military aviation
was so bad, according to the analyst, that NGIC plagiarized a September
1984 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document and tried to post it in
an intelligence report on INTELINK, the intelligence community-wide internal
"Internet" for classified information. The only problem was that
in "cutting and pasting" 1984 Russian helicopter threat information
to justify the Crusader project, the term "Soviet Union" was
left in the Fall 1999 intelligence report. The Soviet Union ceased to exist
nine years earlier.
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- The NGIC analyst also was well aware as early as 2000
that the aluminum tubes discovered in Iraq and were later claimed by the
Bush administration to be for nuclear centrifuges for an Iraqi nuclear
weapons program were nothing more than artillery replacement barrels for
the Italian "Medusa 81" artillery rocket that had been produced
in Egypt. The analyst has personally briefed Dick Cheney, while he was
Secretary of Defense, during Desert Shield in 1990 about the anti-aircraft
gun barrels. The analyst was on loan to the Pentagon's National Military
Joint Intelligence Center (NMJIC) from the Intelligence Threat Analysis
Center (ITAC) at the Washington Navy Yard during Desert Storm and maintains
that Cheney, who he described as a "prick," knew what the aluminum
tubes in 1990 and knew about them when he lied about their being part of
Iraq's nuclear reconstitution program. Also present at the same 1990 intelligence
briefing for Cheney was Pete Williams, the then-Pentagon press spokesman
and currently an NBC TV news reporter.
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- NGIC altered the aluminum tube intelligence by ordering
two individuals -- an artillery and cannon expert, respectively, to write
a bogus intelligence report. The analyst who complained about this said
that determination should have been made by NGIC's Tehnical Chemical Nuclear
(TCN) branch, and not by the two individuals in question. However, the
TCN experts realized that the tubes in question had nothing to do with
a nuclear weapons program.
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- Moreover, the aluminum tubes used to justify the attack
had actually been captured by US forces in Iraq during Desert Storm in
1991 and were conveniently used later to "prove" the existence
of a nuclear program over a decade later.
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- In essence, NGIC tainted raw and refined intelligence
received from its three primary providers -- INSCOM headquarters at Ft.
Belvoir, Virginia; the Defense Intelligence Agency's (DIA) HUMINT collection
databases (including translated intelligence) and NGA.
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- NGIC analysts and MZM contractors at the center also
began altering intelligence databases containing threat data on various
weapons systems, including helicopter production in Russia, Iraq, China,
France, and Poland. When objections were raised to such tampering, the
reply from NGIC/contractor management was "Congress is just a bunch
of liberals and fags . . . we will tell them what they need to know."
The analyst said that MZM, through bribery deals with Cunningham (who served
on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) and GOP Representatives
Katherine Harris (FL) and Virgil Goode (VA), successfully influenced Congress
by successfully tampering with intelligence coming from NGIC. MZM was also
involved in providing unspecified "intelligence services" for
the Bush White House and purchasing furniture for the White House.
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- Goode, who sits on the House Armed Services subcommittee
for Military Construction, received money from MZM and shortly afterwards,
the firm opened an office, complete with Sensitive Compartmented Information
Facilities (SCIFs), in Goode's hometown of Martinsville, Virginia. However,
an NGIC source said that all Goode received from MZM was $40,000, which
compared to what they paid Cunningham, showed that Goode "sold his
ass cheap."
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- http://waynemadsenreport.com/
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