The case finally cracks: 'Dark actors playing games'

It has been awhile since my last posting. It's been a very interesting couple weeks. For one, I finally got a job! Today I start at Computer Zone Consulting, a tech startup in Minneapolis. My job is marketing computer systems to small businesses. It should be interesting!

Also lately I felt the need to back off following the news for a few days and launch into SimCity 4 (Mac) (PC), which is just so excellent. You can run multiple cities at once, which allows commuters, suburbs and regional economies. Also you can follow Sims around as they live in the city. The graphics are great, the music is OK and the addictive potential is high.

Also as you can see I signed one of those associate things with Amazon so I get a kickback if you buy something I link to. Will it net me a single cent? I don't know, but maybe someday...

Meanwhile in the real world it's as if everyone has suddenly woken from some terrible dream and now there's falsified evidence in a State of the Union speech, British arms experts are killing themselves and further questions are emerging on the corruption of intelligence and developments inside the Pentagon. You need to read "The Spies who pushed for war" from the July 17 Guardian:

According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency.

The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.

The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war....

The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.

"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.

The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.

In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.

The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.

The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy.

Hello? What? Moral clarity a-knocking... The dead weapons expert sent out an email about 'Dark actors playing games' with respect to intelligence data. If you're looking for more on this with links to respectable news sources, I suggest checking out 'Coalition of Deceit' by Justin Raimondo. So was this whole Iraq game run by Douglas Feith, Ariel Sharon's office and Richard Perle? Is that closer to reality than anything we've yet had seared into our consciousness?